928
Palworld maker vows to fight Nintendo lawsuit on behalf of fans and indie developers
(www.eurogamer.net)
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
928 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
59207 readers
3055 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Except they didn't steal designs and I'm pretty sure art direction can't be protected. Even if it could, it would be morally questionable at best. The whole lawsuit also isn't about that but about some really fringe patents on Nintendo's part. Patents that Nintendo certainly didn't come up with, shouldn't have and last but not least threaten smaller studios in the game industry. Since Pocketpal teamed up with Sony, I don't consider them indie anymore but it's true that they have to win this lawsuit for indie devs regardless. If Nintendo gets away with this you can say farewell to smaller game studios in Japan.
The fact that Nintendo are going for a patent claim rather than a copyright claim makes me think that they don't think a copyright claim would be successful.
Nor should it be. The standard for copyright violation is pretty high, things don't have to just look similar, they need to actually match, so there's no copyright over the idea of cute, Japanese-themed monsters, especially with other Japanese-themed monster games/shows like Digimon. Even if they matched the art style, you can't copyright art style, you can only copyright the art itself.
Right. I just feel like they'll find it even harder to successfully sue over patents, especially if the patents are fairly generic. The defendants just need to find prior art that predates Nintendo's patents. It's weird that Nintendo aren't saying which patents are being violated.