Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair over Palworld, but one expert isn’t sure the Mario maker has enough to win.
Palworld has been criticised for its very Pokemon-like designs since before it even came out, which honestly, is kind of fair. There are a lot of designs which are incredibly dubious, but none that on the outset seem to cross any copyright boundaries. Potentially Nintendo ended up feeling this way too, as the company has filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair, but over patents specifically, not any of Palworld’s Pal designs. With the lawsuit only just having been filed, it’ll take a while for the results of it to become clear, but Florian Mueller, a former Blizzard consultant, and writer of the now defunct FOSS Patents blog, has shared his thoughts on the “tricky” situation.
“It looks like they are not suing over creative rights relating to how Palworld characters look, though that is what they originally appeared to be concerned about,” writes Mueller. “Patents cover *technical* inventions, except for U.S. design patents. In Japan it appears that they don’t call design rights “patents” and this means they must be suing over software patents that will have nothing to do with what Palworld looks like. Those could be patents on, for instance, 3D image rendering. Such techniques can be used to make something that looks like Pokémon and they can also be used to make something that looks like Warcraft.
“It’s unlikely that Nintendo owns any valid patents (meaning patents that Pocketpair couldn’t shoot down in court) that are so powerful as to prevent Pocketpair from making Palworld. Such patents can usually be worked around. You can get the same (or almost the same) effect using a different technique.”
Mueller goes on to note how small and young companies like Pocketpair typically don’t have any patents they can countersue with, but it is possible the developer could acquire some to do so. The patent expert also goes on to note that Japanese patents are only valid in Japan, so even if Nintendo won, Pocketpair could potentially still keep selling Palworld in other territories (though also notes that Nintendo could be prepared to escalate further).
This really will take a long time to settle though, as Mueller shared that he thinks it’s “more likely to last 5 years than to be settled during the first year,” so for now you can just keep playing your Pokemon-with-guns game.
