Nintendo is suing Pocketpair over its Palworld game, but one expert isn’t sure the Mario creator has enough evidence to win.
Palworld has been criticized for its very Pokémon-like designs even before its release, which is fair enough. There are a lot of designs that are incredibly questionable, but none of them seem to cross copyright lines at first. Nintendo potentially felt that way, too, as the company has filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair, but specifically over patents, not any of Palworld’s designs. Since the lawsuit was recently filed, the results will take some time to become clear, but Florian Mueller, former Blizzard consultant and author of the now-defunct FOSS Patent Bloghas shared his thoughts in a “difficult” situation.
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“They don’t appear to be suing for creative rights related to the look of the Palworld characters, although that initially seemed to be a concern,” Mueller writes. “The patents cover *technical* inventions, except for American design patents. In Japan, they apparently don’t call design rights “patents,” which means they have to sue for software patents that have nothing to do with the look of Palworld. These could be patents for 3D rendering, for example. Such techniques could be used to make something look like Pokémon, and they could also be used to make something look like Warcraft.
“It is unlikely that Nintendo holds any valid patents (i.e. patents that Pocketpair could not overturn in court) that would be strong enough to prevent Pocketpair from creating Palworld. Such patents can usually be circumvented. The same (or almost the same) effect can be achieved by using a different technique.”
Mueller notes that petite and adolescent companies like Pocketpair typically don’t have any patents to invoke, but it’s possible that a developer could acquire them to do so. The patent examiner also notes that Japanese patents are only valid in Japan, so even if Nintendo wins, Pocketpair could potentially still sell Palworld in other territories (though he also notes that Nintendo may be prepared to escalate further).
Although it will take a really long time to figure this out because Mueller common that in his opinion, “the case is more likely to take 5 years than to be resolved within the first year,” so for now, you can just continue playing Pokemon with weapons.
