Though it is worthing that Nintendo is alleging patent infringement, not copyright infringement. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but that doesn't sound like they're going after the models used in Palworld, but more overall mechanics?
Possibly this patent Nintendo has for what seems to be "a thing the player throws at another thing to initiate a fight with it" (IANAL): https://patents.justia.com/patent/20240278129
WB patent the Nemesis system which boiled down is "a system where bosses evolve and get strong based on player interaction'. A patent they have pretty much not used and prevented other games from developing similar interactions.
Patents in gaming are weird and suck hard. They stifle innovation and growth. Games have evolved and grown on the backs of previous games forever.
Patents everywhere are weird and suck hard. They stifle innovation and growth. Human knowledge has evolved and grown on the back of other human knowledge forever.
That’s so bad. You should be able to patent specific rules to protect your game or like board game and avoid people from copy pasting it. But you shouldn’t be able to patent such broad mechanics…
It's a hint that this patent is probably not a direct reaction to Palworld. And it means that we are lacking a significant amount of information regarding the whole history of these patents. Quite possible that they indeed have a trail of patents going back for decades, and this is just the latest addition.
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?
“At press time, Nintendo responded, claiming guns or no they will come after Pocketpair with the same fury with which they go after 17-year olds who make fan games.”
EDIT: Hard Drive is a satyrical site like the Onion. So I just sounded like an idiot reading the Onion for the first time and taking it at face value XD
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My old comment below.
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Yuck. They may have just hired yakuzas lawyers (yakuzas use a lawyers a lot, and are experts in exploiting legal loopholes (and sometimes participating in the creation of them)).
That's a shame to put money into this disgusting mafia.
Note that it's for patents and not copyright (i.e. character likenesses), as many predicted.
It'll be interesting to see which patents Nintendo is trying to assert. Given that Palworld is purely a game, it seems likely to be Nintendo's patents related to game mechanics (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37062820), which I think most people here are justifiably against.
That's interesting. Gameplay patents are difficult to enforce. The handful of successful gameplay-related parents have some technical element to them, e.g. running a mini-game while loading a level was patented on the grounds that running a non-intensive game in the foreground while loading the main game in the background was a technical innovation.
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.
things can be patented even if there's prior art (patent examiners aren't all knowing). One can try to get the patent invalidated if there's prior art or just violate it somewhat brazenly and dare the patent holder to sue you.
you might decide that its not worth violating as the value you get from it isn't much (i.e. mini game while loading might be cute, but might not move the needle at all for sales), and the patent holder might decide not to sue you as they don't view their prospects of winning to be high.
and then you're left in the middle where the patent might prevent novel new ways of doing things because initial violations wont move the needle, but those initial experimentation could open explorations that could eventually move the needle, but since we don't see any moving the needle up front, never get to that point.
> since we don't see any moving the needle up front, never get to that point.
aka, patents no longer "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I think it's high time patents are reformed in the digital world. Things like game mechanics patents, design patents etc, ought to all be abolished.
Look at the fashion industry - there are no patents in clothing design. And they haven't collapsed; in fact, i think fashion florished more because of the lack of patents!
> aka, patents no longer "promote the progress of science and useful arts".
Truly innovative things are often not patented at all anymore, and instead kept as closely guarded business secrets. Patents are mainly used for when the company doesn't have a way to keep it secret, and for random things to bolster IP value.
> Look at the fashion industry - there are no patents in clothing design. And they haven't collapsed; in fact, i think fashion florished more because of the lack of patents!
Ah that depends on your viewpoint. Shein and similar outlets are making bank on stealing stuff from designers and rapid-manufacturing absolute dog quality shit [1].
Had fashion something like design protections, designers would at least have some recourse against these exploiters.
> things can be patented even if there's prior art (patent examiners aren't all knowing).
To be clearer: Patents that are invalid can get issued because the reason for it being invalid is not known, and I'd argue that nowadays this is likely a vast majority of patents. Patents are filed in huge numbers, with many companies just bolstering the number of patents they own as it inflates the value of their intellectual property, rather than caring too much about the value or even validity of each of them.
Figuring out if a patent actually has any value is unfortunately up to those deciding to challenge it.
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.
The Sims 3 has an item-finding minigame in its loading screens, but (for me at least) it's pretty buggy when it comes to actually recognizing inputs (frequently freezes, and there's very little input feedback so you have no idea if it's just frozen or you clicked the wrong thing).
Similarly you could just stuff around on Bayonetta during load times. Useful on 360/Ps3/Wii U but once it came out of PC, SSD speed made that practically pointless.
Some of the Rayman games will allow you to control a silhouette of the character while loading. You can just run around a bit and attack, nothing major, but it's something to do.
Patent offices are cash machines. Their sole mission is to establish clear prior art and attribution and to prevent the same patent from being registered several times. That's all they do.
They couldn't care less about the content of the patent. There are dozens of patents on perpetual energy machines, devices for communicating with spirits, very simple algorithms that have been documented for decades, and so on.
To my understanding the patent office is here to assert if your patent is not stomping on another patent toes. Then you patent whatever and throw it in the legs of your competitor. You'll ultimately lose but you'll have wasted his time, money and brain space. Modern world, modern solutions.
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).
> 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).
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.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to board type games played on a game board or surface, preferably a substantially orthogonally gridded, planar surface, and more particularly to a game which selectively diverts a beam (e.g. laser beam) by user-placed mirrored game pieces that are moved laterally or rotated during play.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many board games have been provided which use paths across their surface as part of the game. An example of such a game is chess. In addition, games exist that depend on the deflection or reflection of objects off of other objects to “score” points.
The following US Patents are examples of board games, each hereby incorporated herein by reference: U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,516,671; 5,145,182; and 6,702,286.
Going into the patent citations there are a number of other laser board games that it references that are different games with different claims as to what they patent. Here's a different board game with lasers that predates Khet - https://patents.google.com/patent/US5145182A/en
Is it different? Do they claim different things? Having something similar isn't necessarily legally similar.
Blue and Gray is a checkers game that is played on a checkers board with checkers pieces and is distinct enough to receive a patent.
Trademarks protect names. Copyrights protect that text or music or ... Patents protect that idea - the rules and mechanics of that game.
The game of the present invention generates a “beam” for each player, which can be a low-powered laser diodes to emit a beam of colored light. These beams are reflected and deflected around the playing field by mirrored surfaces of pieces, or stopped by non-mirrored surfaces of pieces.
The game is won by a player who strategically maneuvers pieces to reflect a laser beam so as to illuminate a key piece belonging to his opponent, e.g., a “Pharaoh” or “King” piece.
With each turn, a player may move one of his pieces to one of the potentially eight, unoccupied adjacent squares (front, back, left, right or diagonal) or may rotate (re-orient) one of his pieces.
After moving or rotating a piece, that player presses a fire button that triggers the emission of a beam above and parallel to the playing surface. If the beam hits a non-mirrored surface of a playing piece, that piece is removed from the board and eliminated from further play, unless it is the key piece, e.g., “King” or “Pharaoh” piece, in which case the game ends.
The pieces can vary in design and setup, with mirrors being located on multiple (e.g. one, two or more) sides or no sides.
And more specifically the claim about movement:
39. A method of playing a game by opposed players; said game comprising two sets of distinguishable playing pieces, each set having movable pieces with no mirrored surfaces, of which one is a key piece, and pieces with at least one mirrored surface, a game board consisting of a first end, a second end, and a plurality of rows and columns, intersecting to form a plurality of spaces, the method comprising the steps of:
placing each player's set of playing pieces on the game in a pre-determined starting configuration; and
alternating turns, each turn comprising moving, either a translation or a rotation, a piece followed by activation of a laser, said alternating moves continuing until one player illuminates the opposing player's key piece;
wherein moving a piece consists of a movement one space in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal direction to an unoccupied adjacent space.
Yes. Very much it does. It's been 35 years since I played Laser Chess, so perhaps there are some minor differences in the rules. But it describes a game so close to Laser Chess that it immediately brought the game to mind.
In laser chess, pieces have different movement rules.
You can move a piece 1 or 2 spaces in a single direction (1 east, or 2 east, but not 1 north east unless that was used as two moves). You could also rotate on your turn. Firing a laser was optional.
In Khet, you can move one piece 1 adjacent spot (any of the 8) or rotate (not both) and you always fired the laser.
The rules are different - and the rules are patented.
If you had different rules that weren't covered by the claims, it would be a different game.
It seems to me like taking chess, same pieces, same game board, same movement, same rules except you can't en passant in the A or H file. Then patenting it. It doesn't seem novel enough qualify for a patent when there is something so similar 20 years prior.
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.
I would like to know about the laws of the United States,
We all have secrets that we don't want people to know.
Is it illegal in the U.S. or in the West to outing someone else if you have the logic that it is a fact?
I am Japanese, but I am very surprised.
Of course, accusations of public value to society are not libel in Japan. Everything is judged on a case by case basis.
As is obvious in the case of a company, it is illegal to disclose a trade secret, even if it is true,
If it is judged by a court to have a positive impact on society, such as by leaking information about illegal activities, it becomes legal.
I don't think this is particularly strange in Japan, but is it different in the U.S. or the West?
However, in recent years, it has become routine in Japan to identify and punish employees who have leaked wrongdoings.
In the evening news this evening, a government employee leaked information about a fraud, and the elected governor identified and pressured the employee, and the employee committed suicide.
Public opinion is overwhelmingly blaming the governor, but the police and other authorities show no signs of acting.
Despite this current situation, anyway, it is legally true that “even the truth can be sued,” and is this different in the US or in the West?
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.
> 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.
I saw a video about this on YouTube the other day.
About 17 minutes long.
Titled “The Nintendo lawsuit you’ve never heard about”.
It was an interesting video. I recommend watching it. (To people here on HN in general, I mean.)
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.
Each of these provides the very similar feature without infringing on Sega's patent.
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.
Gains from enforcing them likely are not great. And games in general are massive pit of potential prior-art... I would guess that if any of the big publishers attacked someone else people would willingly point out something prior-art just to spite those big companies.
Palworld is what happens when Pokemon fans get fed up with the swill that Pokemon puts out every few years.
While the primary goal of the game is to get all of the pals, most of your time is spent putting your pals to work building up your base, breeding better pals, and manufacturing the weapons needed in order to get even better pals. This is a stark contrast to Pokemon games, where you just walk around challenging gym leaders. It's an entirely different game.
So if Pocketpair reskinned a few assets sure, pay Nintendo 5% at most. But those skins had nothing to do with the success of the game and Nintendo doesn't deserve anything more than that.
I think this is kind of a bad take. 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. "Cassette Beasts", "Nexomon" and "Temtem" spring to mind. From larger studios there has been stuff like "Monster Hunter Stories" and "World of Final Fantasy".
Palworld is really a "survival crafting" game and is closer to a game like "Conan Exiles" which has a similar gameplay mechanic of capturing slaves to put to work in your base.
What made Palworld stand out was the shock factor elements of "Pokemon with guns", "make pokemon work as slaves in a factory" and "grind up pokemon for meat", which streamers were able to convert into clickbait thumbnails and views.
> 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.
It's a good example of how IP can throttle our societal creative output. For a couple thousand years we all traded stories and art and dances about shared characters, such as various gods, heroes, legends, and monsters, and then suddenly if someone invents a new hero or monster oops now only they can make stories about it or you go to jail.
It's absurd. Pokemon has made bajillions of dollars, surely it's time to acknowledge it belongs to our common culture and we all now have a right to make up our own stories, games, music, whatever around it.
This isn't radical. It's just a question of time. We would call it madness if Disney claimed to own Greek mythology and sued the makers of the game Hades about it.
Dunno about Pokemon fans. But when I saw a Steam ad for a survival game with cute chimpanzee shooting guns I had to get it. And then the gameplay loop was nice so I spent too much time playing it.
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.
Palworld would’ve been nothing without riding off the coattails of Pokémon. I’m fed up with the modern Pokémon output too, but Palworld is just a stolen, AI-generated flash-in-the-pan.
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.
The accusation was insistently fielded by some malicious actors back when the early access version launched. It was debunked multiple times but it seems like it stuck to some anyway.
AI image generation wasn't good enough in early 2022 to generate game assets. Yeah you could probably generate pokemon-like looking stuff, but it wouldn't be usable as-is in a game.
Edit: and even today. Generate textures for blocky assets? Sure. But full pokémon models that wouldn't need a ton of rework? Nope.
> But full pokémon models that wouldn't need a ton of rework? Nope.
Well, that is the core benefit of using AI - you can save a lot of the groundwork, especially in concept art. Making 20, 30 versions of "fat rat in yellow with lightning bolt symbols in their fur" is cheap with AI, but prohibitively expensive if you're using humans. You're starting running already.
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.
> For most if not all "pals" I could instantly name their Pokemon counterpart
That's not surprising, because for ever Pokemon it's also fairly easy to name their real-world counterpart. There's a finite amount of recognizable real world animals, so you quickly get there even if you've never seen a Pokemon before.
This is inconsistent. If you don’t want to protect big IP then why are you against using that IP? Especially when everything you just complained about is protected, hence why PocketPair didn’t get sued for copyright infringement.
For anybody who's wondering, Nintendo doesn't _actually_ own Pokemon (a common misconception), but has a major stake in "The Pokemon Company", which does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Subsidiaries
As such, I wonder if this structure makes it harder to sue over IP infringement. I agree with others here that patent infringement is a seemingly odd pick, but perhaps this also has to do with character design patents, since Palworld didn't explicitly use Nintendo's IP?
Should be interesting regardless to see what happens
That is a fun fact! Doubly so, because according to Wikipedia, Pokemon is the highest grossing media franchise on the planet, with some estimated $98.8 billion in revenue. Second place is "Micky Mouse & Friends" at a measly $61.4 billion.
I never played any Pokemon, I always thought it was lame, but I absolutely love Palworld. I run my own server and we still play with others, so this makes me sad.
I stopped buying Nintendo things years ago when they began going after emulators, rom sites, and others actively archiving and distributing these means. I don't support litigious companies and the vermin lawyers.
Is it litigious if they're enforcing their own patents? They didn't immediately go after Palworld for copyright infringement, but dug deep and seemingly found something in violation of their own patents lol
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.
>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.
"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."
Mate, Nintendo aren't worried. They have enough money to operate at a a loss for decades without sweating. They're still selling Nintendo Switches by the millions.
I, as a game developer, also ask of a tiny bit of fair play amongst ourselves.
The game isn't fun to play only because they slapped BOTW + pokemon copycats with guns. So, why did they decide to go so much on your face when they could have literally tweaked certain elements to keep them similar but not identical?
People got absolutely bananas with Genshin Impact because of the similarities in style while the core loop and business model being more different.
To top it off, the developers of PalWorld are literal neighbours of Nintendo (both from Kyoto). So this does have to be a very open and direct diss at Nintendo as whole.
I watched a trailer and was constantly questioning myself whether it was Pokémon with guns, or a high-budget clone (noting that there are many b-grade clones of Digimon and Pokémon that aren’t worth litigating against).
My young child was convinced it was Pokémon throughout the whole video. Even cited which Pokémon each ‘pal’ was meant to be.
I know this is for the patent, not the trademark, but doesn’t it cross a line when the likeness of a product causes confusion in the market?
Ignoring the guns, as a whole it looks like Pokémon. I wonder if the reason they went after the ‘mechanic’ of Pokémon is because each individual asset is distinct from it?
> 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 didn't know what Pocketpair was and immediate glace made me think they were Pokemon and Nintendo was suing because Pocketpair+Nintendo were in a partnership/official-license and something had broken down in the relationship.
Nope!
Clearly mimicking Pokemon and even all the headlines are "Pokemon with guns". Is it okay? No idea, this seems extremely muddy.
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 certainly raises questions about the not-Pokemon-wink-wink Digimon franchise. Or the recent Cassette Beasts[0] which has a lot more mechanical similarities to a Pokemon game than Palworld.
it would be incredibly dull if only one company was allowed to make "catch things and make them fight for you" games. Or a game whereupon the player character is rendered from the point of view of the character's eyes, there are multiple other characters (player or non-player) and shooting was the point.
valve being so successful with half-life, when it was just a "less alien" version of unreal, or a less "doom" version of "Quake". Yes it was a great game but the mechanics of gameplay existed for ages; prince of persia had the 3d platforming, the ones previously mentioned for FPS, i don't think the gravity gun was unique itself, but perhaps in a first person shooter, it was. Heck borderlands and rage take half life style gameplay to new places. Minecraft wasn't original (also Lego, in there too).
innovation requires "remixing". Wholesale copying of assets and code should be punished. "prior art" needs to be scrutinized, because "did they actually make this, is it actually novel" is an important question.
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.
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.
This being a patent suit is very bizarre. Everyone was expecting a copyright lawsuit, if anything. I'm not a big fan of software patents, and it seems like they're only exercised as a convenient bludgeon against a rival, not based on something a company feels it legitimately invented.
Software patents are much worse for something fast evolving like video game mechanics were over the past 30 years or so. Imagine, for example, if id software had patented the first person shooter mechanics from Doom. It would have 20 years after that (2013) before anyone could offer a similar FPS and id would have been able to tack on incremental patents to extend their lock on the FPS market for decades longer.
Monolith patented their nemesis system, so it went nowhere. The thought that we were one personal stance away from the whole FPS genre not existing is pretty chilling.
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.
Given Nintendo's last lawsuit related to patents took several years and ended not with a court win or the game ever shut down during that time but with them getting a settlement, Pocketpair is likely fine.
Pocketpair might have difficulties partnering with many businesses even outside of gaming in the future, since I've been led to believe the non-legal effects tend to matter quite a bit in Japan as well, but they have global appeal and can find foreign partners if they need to.
What makes software patents different than any other patent if it is a genuinely unique piece of software? Not a baited question, by the way. I don't understand why it would be different unless it's something like zooming in or copy and paste.
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.
I don't see how the speed of development impacts the rights to the first person patenting it. It seems like if I was to make a novel system, seeking a patent should be at the top of my list.
I agree with your second point entirely. I can see how closed doors can impede progress. But I thought that's what licensing was for.
Also, the argument I'm questioning is that software patents are inherently wrong as a concept. I still don't get that.
>It seems like if I was to make a novel system, seeking a patent should be at the top of my list.
Unless you've got a good chunk of cash or the backing of a decent sized corporation, filing a patent is pretty difficult and burdonsome for an individual. And even then actually enforcing it against infringers takes even more money.
The patent process is slow but not a fixed time. It's variable.
If the variability in time-to-patent exceeds the delta between independent inventions you no longer have a fair system.
At best you're randomly rewarding the patent to one lucky inventor. At worst you're rewarding it to the one who is best able to game the patent system, encouraging corruption throughout.
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)
It might just be they've got enough money to make them a juicy enough target to go after for damages. I can't imagine it took the lawyers this long to come up with something to sue them over, and the game didn't exactly fly under the radar... so I'm not sure what else it could be.
I suppose there might have been a flurry of scary lawyer letters being sent back and forth and the lawsuit only happened once negotiations broke down.
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.
It's probably because two months ago PocketPair announced a joint venture with Sony Music and Aniplex that includes merchandising. [1] The revenue from the Pokémon games is nothing compared to the revenue from merch; Pokémon merch generates more revenue per year than Pokémon GO generated over its entire lifetime. [2,3]
Thus Nintendo is likely more concerned with consumer confusion between Palworld and Pokémon merch than between the games. On top of that it would damage The Pokémon Company's position in any negotiations surrounding merchandising agreements, because partners can use a potential Palworld merch deal as leverage to get a better deal from The Pokémon Company.
Nintendo posted an announcement about "we're looking into this" around 6d after the game was released, so I imagine they were thinking carefully about the cost/benefit and whether they could win.
> A sighting direction within a virtual space is determined based on second operation input in a first mode, a player character is allowed to release an item affecting a field character disposed on a field within a virtual space toward the sighting direction on the basis of third operation input, a sighting direction is determined based on second operation input in a second mode, and the play character is allowed to release a fighting character who fights toward the sighting direction on the basis of the third operation input.
It's also illustrative of the inherent absurdity of software patents—absolutely ridiculous that something so incredibly general could be patented, but here we are.
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
"They have spent the last few years doing nothing but suing fans so they won’t be prepared to face lawyers that are completely identical to them but are better because as I said before, they have guns.”
The lawsuit was filed in a Japanese court. What if the company just stops offering the game in Japan? Unless the same patent also exists in other countries (which would require separate lawsuits in each jurisdiction that heavily depends on specific laws), whatever the outcome of this lawsuit won't matter elsewhere in the world, right?
Suing for software patents is... an interesting move.
Working with lawyers in my job they made it very clear software patents are a nightmare to enforce. I think Oracle v Google proves this pretty clearly.
There can be no lawsuit here without upsetting the entire gaming industry. Sue star wars survivor series for being a blatant ripoff of sekiro but based in star wars - where do you draw the line? Games have copied mechanics for as long as there have been games.
I have no faith in the courts, however, and nintendo usually wins these stupid things.
> There can be no lawsuit here without upsetting the entire gaming industry. Sue star wars survivor series for being a blatant ripoff of sekiro but based in star wars - where do you draw the line?
At worst that would just result in that title not being offered for sale in Japan anymore. Remember, as a Japanese lawsuit, this suit's scope is limited to Japan.
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.
Probably Nintendo is suing on the catching mechanic which is pretty much the same in both games. In Palworld, the player has a team of Pals and, in order to catch a new Pal, they must fight and after some damage throw a catching ball at the right moment.
Could someone patent a monster catching mechanic, anyway?
The capture mechanic was introduced all the way back in the first Pokemon game, which was released in 1996.
As patents only last 20 years, it should have expired years ago.
My understanding is that the patent must be filed before public demonstration (aka, the release of the game), or within a 1 year grace period, otherwise it's invalid.
Nintendo's legal department feels it's led by a bunch of extremely spoiled and jealous children. This lawsuit is like the corporate equivalent of a child seeing what another kid made in art class and getting angry because it's better than what they made. Instead of learning from it and trying to create something even better themselves next time, they just trying to destroy what the other kid made so it doesn't make them look bad.
Also, apparently some of the relevant patents were filed by Nintendo after the release of Palworld, which makes it even worse. Unfortunately, since the lawsuit was filed in Japan and both companies are japanese, Nintendo will likely win by default.
On a related topic, there was a recent lawsuit from IBM against Zynga over some obvious patents (like showing ads along with content), but it seems that the news didn't appear on HN somehow?
Reminder: This was filed in a Japanese court, so anything relating to the legal systems of other countries is irrelevant. The effects of the outcome of this case will be limited to Japan.
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".
Every single owner of intellectual property is a monopolist. The government grants them a monopoly on the information for a number of years.
Patents are somewhat tolerable monopolies: they tend to last only a quarter of our lifetimes. Once they expire, the information is freed from their "ownership".
Nintendo didn't build their fortunes on patents, though. They built it on copyrights. You and I will likely be long dead before those works enter the public domain. If they ever do.
For those wondering, here is a video that compares Pokemon with Palworld characters, there are a ton that are rip offs, and all together it is a pretty clear rip off:
None of these are rip-offs. The comparisons are kind of ridiculous, a Pal that looks like a penguin, they must have stolen that idea from the Pokemon that looks like a penguin.
I don't want to live in a world where something like this would be considered copyright infringement, something that even Nintendo doesn't seem to focus on (I guess for a reason).
If that first article is the best you have, then that's a bad pile of articles. Those designs are not very close.
I see no creature design comparisons in links 2-4.
Article 5, wow it's a cartoon sheep. Wow it's a cartoon fox. This list at the end is trying way too hard.
I think what "most people see" is that they're overall similar to pokemon. Not that palworld is copying specific designs in a way that pokemon itself doesn't do.
The examples were in my original YouTube post - it goes on for a really long time time.
The latest set of links was to show that a majority of reviews considered PalWorld to be a ripoff of Pokemon.
Anyhow, top voted comment on this whole hacker news article is a satirical article on how PalWorld copied Pokemon characters but added guns, so yeah, you guys claiming it isn't a ripoff have minority viewpoints but you are pretty insistent on it, so have fun with that!
"ripoff" is a very vague term and not equivalent to copying specific creature designs. I can call lots of AAA games ripoffs. I'm not specifically saying PalWorld isn't a ripoff here, what people call ripoff is pretty subjective, I'm saying the designs are fine. (Though the gameplay is very different from pokemon.)
It is indeed satirical but you can agree with the SEO spam you sent before, just don't expect people to agree with you and whine about it if they don't, in fact I really doubt it's the minority viewpoint given you got downvoted and plenty of people upvoted mine, reality speaks for itself.
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