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Nintendo secures two more anti-Palworld U.S. patents, might file multi-patent U.S. lawsuit against Pocketpair in a matter of months now – games fray

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Nintendo secures two more anti-Palworld U.S. patents, might file multi-patent U.S. lawsuit against Pocketpair in a matter of months now – games fray

28 comments
  • if patents are meant to protect new inventions, how come Nintendo is asserting patents for which it applied months after Palworld launched?

    The answer, it turns out, is ridiculous legal bullshit that makes no sense. Just like most of patent law.

  • Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I've never heard of this website but I'm pretty impressed.

    Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn't seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.

    The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.

    If I were in writing the rules, there'd be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.

28 comments