Nintendo Files Suit for Infringement of Patent Rights Against Pocketpair, Inc

How the hell can you patent that. And it isn't even specific. That's just absurd...

Also, it was filed on May 2, 2024. Seems to me like there's millions of instances of prior art in that case.

Man, I'm really tired of patents and copyright. I'm not sure what's supposed to come out of this. Nobody is allowed to make a Pokemon-like game anymore? Who does that benefit other than Nintendo/TPC?

is there a clause in US patent law where if you choose to either selectively enforce your patents, or not enforcing them for a while then suddenly starting to do so, invalidates your patent?

That's the Mario's hat patent

Wow, did they really patent rock throwing. How the F is that allowed.

The Hard Drive is a satirical news site like The Onion. They even say they are satire on their about page [1].

[1] https://hard-drive.net/about/

hard drive is satire

I can't understand how the game-while-loading hot granted. This "invention" was already invented and used long before, for example the "invade-a-load" fastloader on C64.

> running a non-intensive game in the foreground while loading the main game in the background was a technical innovation.

#EndSoftwarePatents

The "loading screen" patent expired in 2015[0]. I cannot think of any games which have incorporated this feature. Then again, on a PC, loading screens are typically so short I cannot even read the hint text they attempt to display.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-pa...

Scott the Woz did a video about loading screens that goes through some examples of playable loading screens if anyone's interested https://youtu.be/odk5l9J0hls?si=pORelt9YJK92rD0E

If they're so difficult to enforce, why are the patents issued in the first place? What a broken system.

> Gameplay patents are difficult to enforce.

In Japan, or in other countries?

Maybe that's just an intimidation technique on Nintendo's part.

> I am absolutely not a lawyer; but, I don't believe game mechanics are patentable in the United States (this is Japan, so of course that doesn't matter); but there's a reason there's a lot of -opoly games that aren't Monopoly (and the -opoly, non-Monopoly games are not Hasbro games, in general).

Some patents of interest:

Method of conducting simultaneous gameplay using stackable game pieces https://patents.google.com/patent/US6352262B1/en https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/225/icehouse

Trading card game method of play https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/463/magic-the-gathering

Light-reflecting board game https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242B2/en https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16991/khet-the-laser-gam... (and the patent win https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2012/11/26/271633... )

You will note that http://www.gamecabinet.com (of old) has a link to searching US Patents on board games - http://www.gamecabinet.com/info/PatentSearch.html

From A Gamut of Games by Sid Sackson:

    THE FILES OF PATENTS that have been granted are a fruitful hunting ground for forgotten games, although going through these files, as anyone who has ever been involved in a patent search well knows, is a time consuming job. Often the patented games are downright silly, such as a set of dominos made of rubber so that they can double as ink erasers (No. 729,489) or a sliding block puzzle with edible pieces so that a player who despairs of a solution can find consolation in gratifying his stomach (No. 1,274,294). Often the patents are repetitious: There are over a hundred variations of the well-known checkerboard and over a thousand different baseball games.

    ...

    Preceding THE LANDLORD'S GAME by just under a year, on April 21, 1903, Patent No. 726,023 was granted to Henry Busch and Arthur Jaeger, also for a game board. Their game, called BLUE AND GRAY, made no lasting impression in the world of games which, I suppose, is understandable since it didn't have the innovative qualities of THE LANDLORD's GAME. Yet it was, and is, a delightful pastime, which should particularly appeal to the ChEckers fan who is looking for something different.

    The name Blue and Gray, of course, refers to the uniforms of the South and the North in the Civil War and in the original game the playing pieces of the contestants were of those colors.

Japanese legal system is... well... not good by Western standards. Remember it's a place where you can be sued for defamation even if you say verifiably true things.

IANAL, but I'm going to chime in as someone familiar with one significant aspect of how the Japanese patent system is used.

It is very common in Japan for large companies like Nintendo to file and hold patents for smaller companies, this is especially prominent in the video game industry. This is a tradition borne out of, ironically, refusal to use the patent system at first.

For those that don't know, a lot of Japanese society operates on the honor system. You are expected to be truthful and honorable in your business dealings and in general. Patents were initially shunned because Japanese people didn't see a need, you don't need a rights protection system if everyone already respects them. That notion went straight out the window once Japan had to compete on the world stage: Suddenly, westerners saw Japanese ideas that weren't protected by patents and patented them and Japanese companies subsequently got sued and lost.

This led to a critical reassessment of how Japanese values are applied, and the result was that larger companies with sufficient financial strength would register and hold patents for smaller companies (not necessarily affiliated, by the way) who don't have the money to pay for all that, and in exchange those patents would be shared as a Japanese industry-wide good.

Nintendo is one such custodian of patents for the wider Japanese video game industry at large.

I am going to presume that Nintendo is suing Palworld for reasons beyond just its own interests in Pokemon. I haven't played Palworld nor have I looked at the details of this lawsuit, so I can't make an in-depth comment; but this probably isn't Nintendo acting like a copyright draconian as they are commonly seen in the west, rather they are likely doing this for the sake of the entire Japanese video game industry at large.

A few years ago, Nintendo sued (and won) a fellow Japanese video game developer, COLOPL, for infringing on mechanics patents that Nintendo was holding as custodian for the industry. Why? Because COLOPL broke the gentlemen's agreement and filed their own patent for the mechanic.

Hideo Kojima has a patent thats basically covers HP bars and health potions. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7635300B2/en

And Monopoly itself is based on The Landlord’s Game, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game

The original game was covered by two patents. Parker Brothers bought them from the creator after finding out that Charles Darrow had lied when he claimed that Monopoly was his own invention.

Aren't patents of video game mechanics protect the technical implementation of a feature and not the feature itself?

I've always been under assumption that one can avoid patent infringing if the underlying implementation is different enough.

For example, one of more famous patents is Sega's yellow arrow on top of the screen, showing player where is the next objective. In your game you can still use that feature of "showing player in which direction the objective is", you just have to be more creative about it, here are some immediate ideas I got:

  - small red hand pops up from side of screen when you're stuck for a minute and points to objective
  - player character himself points with hand to your goal
  - make sun, moon or other celestial body appear on the sky in the direction where the objective is.

My understanding is that game mechanics are not copyrightable but they may be patentable, e.g. the US patent for Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/warner-bros-finally-secures-pa...).

Monopoly was patented-- in 1935. So that's long-expired.

And many of the non-Hasbro -opoly games (that use that as part of their name) actually are licensed. Hasbro's been known to go after unauthorized users of the name for trademark infringement.

I've built games in the US where we specifically avoided certain features(if I recall correctly around minigames on loading screens) because of those concerns. We never got to find out if they were enforceable but they certainly impacted how we build the title(which never really had a material outcome, the game was doomed for other reasons).

You can't just patent any random game mechanics you might be able to think of, but nothing in patent law categorically precludes patenting them. I don't recall the details, but Wizards of the Coast infamously had a patent on a specific combination of mechanics in Magic: The Gathering, which led to several card games carefully constructed to not infringe the patent in question. This typically took the form of all cards in the game being included in a single box instead of random packs, but in at least one case a company produced a pointed parody in which the instructions told players to not to assemble decks from randomly allocated cards and then "tap" them for resources because that would be patent infringement.

> I don't believe game mechanics are patentable in the United States

They are. But it’s rarely done. And even more rarely enforced.

Patents usually run out after 20 years, much faster than copyright, and Monopoly was around for much longer.

> There have been plenty of "monster catching game"/"pokemon with the serial numbers filed off" games that have been somewhat successful, but no smash hits.

Notably, the Megami Tensei series, which predates Pokemon.

I enjoy playing Palworld. I can’t stomach the thought of playing yet another Pokémon as I know it will be the same game with differently named gym leaders. Palworld is fun because it isn’t Pokémon. That YouTubers will be YouTubers has nothing to do with it in my case.

IP is so valuable; Hope we have a better system let everyone happy.

Is it really fair to call word of mouth "marketing" in this context, where it's implied to be intentionally pushed by the developer?

Nintendo doesn’t even deserve 1%.

Catching? Maybe. You use “balls” to catch things. A pokeball seems very similar to the ghost traps from Ghostbusters, for example.

Fighting? Not at all similar, unless Psyduck suddenly got Gatling guns.

Catching is pretty much the same, fighting, yes and now. Original Pokemon is round based with a specific battle screen, while Palworld is real-time on the overworld. Though, the latest Pokemon-Game has a mode where Pokemon can fight others in real-time in the overworld, without interaction of the player. And IIRC you can also catch Pokemon from the overworld directly or at least initiate a Player-controlled fight. So it's very similar to Palworld, but not exactly the same.

I'm really having a problem understanding this mindset - all FPS games (especially older ones) were riding on coat-tails of Doom and other ID games. Which is great - we got a whole cultural revolution in wider gaming and spawned a massively popular genre full of experimentation on that formula. There's countless examples of this in culture through history.

How is that bad? Why is there this strong wish for a single corporation to own our culture and what we are without allowance to experiment, build upon it and allow market competition for the best evolution?

Tools like Stable Diffusion didn't even exist when Palworld and its creature designs were being shown. Unless you have evidence they were somehow AI generated, it sounds like you're just spreading falsehoods.

Where's this AI accusation coming from?

How do you know Palworld wouldn’t be successful without Pokemon? I would think it would be even more successful since they would be the first with the monster collecting system.

I absolutely agree, I'm not for protecting big IP when fanmade alternatives are created.

But Palword feels such a rip off of Zelda BOTW (the intro and the items are 1:1 the same of Zelda, even the tablet!) and Pokemon.

For most if not all "pals" I could instantly name their Pokemon counterpart, that is textbook copyright infringement done in the weakest form.

(+$45.4B for Disney princess)

There are a large number of patents out there that have no business existing (overly broad, ridiculous broad, patents stuff that already existed or shouldn't be able to be patented, etc). Software patents in particular have quite a bad reputation for this. So yes, trying to enforce one's own patents can absolutely be litigious, since the patents themselves can have no business existing in the first place.

When their patents include things like "a character stepping on a moving surface and moving along with it [1]", yes, it's litigious.

[1] https://automaton-media.com/en/news/20230808-20590/

Feels to me like they went after them the moment they became successful? I dunno, that feels kinda uncool to me.

>Is it litigious if they're enforcing their own patents?

In most cases, probably yeah. Patent trolls and malicious actors make such easy money off of frivolous patents that the default assumption in cases like these is that it's just a litigious action to make a quick buck. We're at the stage where it's very rare for a patent to actually aid innovation rather than stifle it.

Early on there were countless pokemon clones back to the OG gameboy that were far more egregious in use of various pokemon features and methods, and there hasn't been legal claim to shut any of them down in 25 years. It is a well discussed topic with the pokemon vs palworld haters, so if Nintendo has anything, I imagine they found some minor method that probably shouldn't have had a patent anyways, but the Japanese agency over patents loving Nintendo for 100 years already gave it freely regardless.

Now with Nintendo in short of revenue and late with a new platform for Christmas with their stock taking a beating, I guess this is how they'll make up some difference and feed their wild herd of lawyers hungry for some action in the mean time.

Rabidly litigious companies still disgust me when outside developers fill a void they cannot or will not. I can buy from Amazon hard drives and entire systems filled with every Nintendo video game from the 80's on, maybe they should sic the lawyers on them instead of the little guys like Pocketpair putting a positive spin on the genre.

> The game seems like a collage of stolen bits rather than a nice blend of games (which is in what the gaming industry excels).

But it is fun to play. And that's all we ask from games.

Gameplay-wise, the game is actually far more similar to Ark: Survival Evolved than any Pokemon games.

> My young child was convinced it was Pokémon throughout the whole video

I figure the biggest thing causing the seeming parallels is the art style, which is pokemon-esque (cute, colorful, fluffy, polished, original). Second to that comes the balls

I think the games are so clearly different in mechanics, audience and design that, all they have is character likeness infringement. But there are literally hundreds of pokemon, and I have a hard time suggesting Pokemon should be the sole rights holder for "Pokemon like character design".

Given how broad the Pokemon character IP is, I am surprised Nintendo has not been sued themselves. But so different is IP law in Japan that Pokemon itself was altered at inception to avoid being in conflict with an entirely unrelated IP, Ultraman. The game was originally capsule monsters, but Ultraman has capsules, so they changed it, even though the stories and world's mechanics are otherwise entirely different.

It's unclear how mimicking Pokemon would be a basis for a lawsuit because Nintendo doesn't own the monster taming genre. There's a long history of others, including a couple that predate Pokemon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster-taming_game

Its very difficult to find a game that doesn't have a few dozen other nearly identical in their game play. There's a reason for that, which is that they are not legally protected. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are very specific and narrow in their definition.

> Clearly mimicking Pokemon

And yet no one would confuse the two. It's not a copyright or any other case, its a patent case. And "game mechanic" patents are frankly gross, in my opinion.

Or if BB King patented the blues scale

Which might be why John Carmack threatened to quit if id ever tried to patent software.

Japanese laws pertaining to copyright/corporate rights in general can make the US look like a paradise of freedom.

Another game company, Konami, is suing Cygames for--in short--having a system where characters compete and can be leveled up.

Plus the concept of "fair use" technically kind of exists legally but not in practice. You sample something and the owner doesn't approve, you're screwed. You don't sample something but simply say something that lowers their reputation, you're screwed (the bar for "libel" is incredibly low--even facts can be successfully tried so long as it can be proven that the intention was to in some way lower a person or particularly a company's reputation). The last one is particularly funny since you'll see the media giving endless praise to a CEO/businessperson and treating them as Jesus 2.0, but the very day they die, the floodgates open and you find out they've committed every crime known to mankind and everyone around them knew it.

Basically, Pocketpair is quite likely heavily screwed. Nintendo can attack them on several fronts and likely will. People saying they made a better Pokemon than Nintendo themselves probably angered a few people within the company and it's easier to take them out legally than to actually compete.

I would argue the speed at which innovation occurs in software world means "original" work is happening in multiple places simultaneously. It's not fair to simply grant the first claim, especially considering how slow the patent system is.

That, and that software is so easy to copy you could argue that not copying it greatly impedes technological advancement of your society. Especially in comparison with adversaries who will violate the patents freely.

There's a general ban on patentability of mathematical algorithms on the basis that they're not invented but discovered.

The legal basis for why that doesn't apply to software has always seemed specious at best to me.

Patents are there to protect people who develop concrete solutions and products. Patents are not there to protect scientific discoveries or intellectual works.

It's much easier to compare two screw heads and work out who copied who from the dates they were put on the market than it is to work out who invented the flashing icon first. What's more, it's an endless debate as to whether the flashing icon can be traced back to an ATARI 2600 game from 1988 is a prior art.

Furthermore, patent protection must not have a disproportionate effect on the market. A patent and the licensing conditions for a technology such as the seat belt or ABS brakes should not completely prevent other car manufacturers from implementing them.

Software patents are often at the limit of mathematical demonstration, the absence of prior art is difficult to prove and they have disproportionate effects which are exploited by patent trolls. The market is made up of thousands of small studios and independent developers who don't have the means to search for patents. This is not the same as the aerospace market, with 5-6 major manufacturers all backed by law firms specialising in intellectual property and patents.

This has been tested and even the most fervent capitalist thinks it was a bad idea. The only people who really defend software patents are patent trolls.

not a lawyer but i write software so this is not 100% accurate information i have found on the internet and repeated back to me. further corrections are appreciated

software patents usually don't contain source code. just the general idea of how to achieve the outcome, they can be very broad or very subjective depending on who is in court

Patents Vs. Copyright: you can create software that does the same thing differently. kinda like torrenting vs direct download, they both deliver bytes too you but the bytes are delivered/received in very different ways.

taking someones software/machine instructions (the bytes that are the code) and calling it your own is copyright infringment.

if someone creates a new patented algorithm and you copy that algorithm into a different language then it is patent infrigement.

also patents have too be filed and approved while copyright is generally a given if the copyright is not already existing (depending on your jurisdiction i guess)

I believe they were waiting for something, too. And the game is successful enough to make some bank out of it. Coromon also has tons of similarities, judging from the demo alone, and I doubt they were ever sued. Correct me if I am wrong, anyone.

> is allowed to release a fighting character who fights

The text of the patent actually seems more like its based on throwing out your captured pals to fight, not catching them.

That rumor from when the game launched was debunked

Copying some textures wouldn't lead to a patent lawsuit.

That's simply untrue.

Sure, use some Pokémon as placeholders during development, but, No one even bothered to dedicate an employee to preventing those assets from getting shipped?? Gamers already had their fun, too bad for any investors that they didn’t cover their bases

Corporate re-domiciliation is a thing.

I also just read both companies are in Japan, so Japanese patent law applies, which I have no idea what that looks like.

That is a bad case though. Japan gaming industry still produces great titles. Meanwhile the US industry is suffering massive layoffs and brain drain, all while investing tons into predatory crap like candy crush or the 5 billionth cod reskin instead. Nintendo being a patent troll here does not help the japanese gaming industry nor the broader industry at large, it discourages competition at best.

In that case, the company (which is Japanese) would presumably need to relocate to another country entirely, which would be nontrivial and would probably require replacing most of their staff.

It's entirely possible such a move just isn't survivable for the game.

I meant the actual court document. There is an electronic system, https://www.courts.go.jp/saiban/online/mints/index.html, but I am not sure it is public.

The competition against Nintendo is the vast array of indie devs.

Nintendo's perceptions of their rights are far in excess of reasonable. Attempting to defend that does make them bad.

Intellectual property monopolists should not even exist in the first place, much less have "rights" to "defend" in court, real or perceived. The whole premise is absurd to begin with. I can't believe it got to the point where people are debating the relative morality of monopolists defending their "rights".

Not all of them, some of them are stretches, but quite a few of them are clear ripoffs if you are objective.