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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Half of Pokémon are heavily inspired by artist's (who are not affiliated with Nintendo) illustrations of popular Yokai (Japanese mythological creatures). The rest are simply animals with very generic additions. "It's a cow but bipedal" "It's a kangaroo but with horns" "It's a pigeon but... actually yeah it's just a pigeon. No difference."
How can you copyright/patent that? It's hardly original.
I say this as someone who grew up loving Pokémon.
It's a patent case. It has nothing to do with the creative design of the games.
But yes. Every pokemon is copyrighted. Every pal is copyrighted. (In the US) All creative work is automatically copyrighted to the creator.
You can't copyright "a standing lizard with a small flame on its tail" but you can copyright Charmander. If you copy enough elements that a lay person can't distinguish the original and the copy then it opens it up for a copyright claim.
None of that is relevant in this case.
A patent is to protect a specific invention from being copied. In this case, there is an innovative game mechanic that Nintendo patented has that Palworld copied. The speculation is with throwing an item that captures a character that fights other characters in a 3d space.
The patent is dumb. Personally I don't think it is innovative or special enough to be patented. Patenting software or game mechanic are dumb anyway.
And hopefully something that they'll be able to find reams of prior art that precede the patent
Not sure how it works in Japan, but in many nations you have to file for a patent before or pretty soon after you release your product / service. In the US I think there's a 1 year grace period. It's a pretty common sense thing that stops whole businesses springing up and then being shut down by patent creation just like we are seeing here.
There are many games out there now that involve catching monsters and making them fight for you, Nintendo would be shutting down 100s, if not 1000s of developers if they wanted to go ahead with this and have it be taken seriously.
Anyone that has played Palworld will tell you that it much more resembles ARK than it does any Pokémon game or experience anyway.