A Japanese IP attorney highlights a patent family that might be at the center of Nintendo's lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair.
  • rbnEnglish
    13·
    4 hours ago

    How the hell can one have patent of ‘catching a creature through aiming’ or even more crazy to me ‘riding a creature’ in games? Both concepts exist in so many games and even in real life. I mean did Nintendo never hear of horses?

    • ASDraptor@lemmy.autism.placeEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      Greed. Simple as that. They only care for money. And they used to get a pass because they made good games. Not anymore.

  • Kelly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    4 hours ago

    My lay understanding was that patents were invalidated if prior art could be found before the application date?

    If that was true then no patent Nintendo applied for after palwold demonstrated its use of a technique would hold water. This demonstration would be easy to verify as occurring at the time of release of preview videos, the games release, content patches, etc

    So I must be wrong if they think JP7545191B1 might be the one.

      • Ookami38@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        26 minutes ago

        I’ve heard this a few times, but what does it ultimately mean? Doesn’t it mean that, if they desired, they could still operate and just not sell in Japan? Granted, obviously, if the dev is Japanese (I have no idea in this case and don’t feel like looking) then they’d have some issues, but for a western developer, it’d still be bad, losing all Japanese sales, but overall manageable.

        • ASDraptor@lemmy.autism.placeEnglish
          3·
          14 minutes ago

          I’m not a lawyer, so my knowledge is limited, but from what I understand, you can only make a claim for a patent infringement in the country where the company responsible for the infringement is located.

          So they have this patent in Japan, but if I make a Pokémon-like game but I’m from, say, France, where this patent doesn’t exist, Nintendo can only suck it up and cope, because they don’t have a patent for this in France.