4mo ago

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

PC Gaming @lemmy.ca

alessandro @lemmy.ca

5mo ago

gamesfray.com /nintendo-secures-two-more-anti-palworld-u-s-patents-might-file-multi-patent-u-s-lawsuit-against-pocketpair-in-a-matter-of-months-now/

22 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.
- As much as I love many Nintendo games, their business practices are so anti-consumer. The Switch is definitely the last of their console I buy for the foreseeable future.
- 10 years is way too much, I'd go with 5.
Guess a Nintendo boycott is long overdue
- Nintendo fanboys would never
  
  This one is.
  
  this is actually the opposite of what I've seen. quite a few fanboys are dubious and some are boycotting with sad expressions on their faces.
  that's how badly nintendo have fucked up. sensible individuals amongst their own fan base are turning on them.
  
  Between my wife and I we own damn near every Nintendo console, including every game boy, most of the DS/3DS versions, and even the Wii U. We bought two Switches because we both wanted to play BotW so badly at the same time lol.
  This is where I draw the line. Palworld is an imperfect but fun game that I really enjoyed, and PocketPair deserves their success. It's entirely on Nintendo/Game Freak for utterly failing to innovate that they now have such strong competition. They had more than enough money to try something new, get fucked.
- It’d be as effective as the PC players boycott of MW2
  
  There’s that fopdoodle spirit! “Nothing we can do will ever matter so why try?”
The millions of people who bought Palworld should be able to class action lawsuit Nintendo for fucking up the game they paid for.
- Yeah that's what I thought the other day as well. They should all get together and take Nintendo to court.
What a terrible company, good games and unique hardware but this is something else.
Fuck Nintendo. Stop giving them money.
- I played Twilight princess abd OoT on my Steamdeck then formatted the sd card and removed emudeck. RIP Nintendo. You used to be cool.
Nintendo and Nestle should merge
- And then die.
- tbf nestle has made even more efforts than the average other competing grocery megacorpo theyre all bad and i personally avoid as much as of them given my energy levels

22 comments