Pocket pair
Nintendo and The Pokemon Company announced that they have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair, the creators of the Pokemon-inspired game. Pal WorldThe Tokyo District Court lawsuit seeks an injunction and damages “on the grounds that Pal World “infringes multiple patent rights,” the announcement said.
“Nintendo will continue to take appropriate action against any infringement of its intellectual property rights, including the Nintendo brand itself, to protect the intellectual properties it has worked hard to establish over the years,” the company wrote.
The many superficial similarities between Pokémon and Pal World They're obvious, though Pocketpair's game adds many more new features than Nintendo's (like, say, weapons). But doing legal justice even on important commonalities between games can be an uphill battle. That's because copyright law (at least in the U.S.) generally doesn't apply to mere design elements of a game, and only extends to “expressive elements” like art, character design, and music. Usually, even blatant rip-offs of successful games can make just enough changes to those “expressive” parts to avoid legal trouble. But Pal World It could exceed the high legal bar for infringement if the game's 3D character models were indeed taken almost entirely from the actual Pokémon game files, as some observers have been alleging since January.
What patent are we talking about?
Beyond mere copyright concerns, however, Nintendo's lawsuit announcement specifically alleges that patent infringement by Pal World (though this difference could be due to the vagaries of the translation of the original Japanese.) A patent suit would apparently require some unique gameplay mechanic or feature that the patent office has specifically granted stronger protections to. While the Pokémon Company holds several (U.S.) patents, most of them appear to deal with various methods of communicating with servers or the sleep monitoring capabilities of Pokémon Sleep.
“Pal World It's a very different kind of game from Pokémon“It's hard to imagine what patents (*not* copyrights) could plausibly have been infringed,” video game industry lawyer Richard Hoeg posted on social media Wednesday night. “The initial knee-jerk reaction is that Nintendo may be overreacting.”
PocketPair CEO Takuro Mizobe told Automaton Media in January that the game had “passed legal reviews” and that “we have absolutely no intention of infringing on other companies' intellectual property.”
Shortly after Pal World became a viral mega-hit on Steam in January, Nintendo said it would “investigate and take appropriate action” against “another [then-unnamed] The company's game is set to launch in January 2024.” Those measures are now moving forward even as Pal WorldThe initial burst of popularity has given way to a more modest number of players in recent months.