An Embarrassing Failure of the Us Patent System: Nintendo's Latest Patents
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Nintendo's recent patents on Pokémon mechanics have sparked controversy, with many criticizing the US patent system for allowing overly broad and obvious patents, stifling innovation in the gaming industry.
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It’s like in literature if someone could patent the idea of a detective investigating a murder.
How could the "pokemon-like" genre even exist if you couldn’t create a game that uses “summoning and battling characters”?
Even worse, that description alone applies to multiple genres... JRPGs, or even fighting games with multiple characters (something like Marvel vs. Capcom) could fit that description.
I can understand intellectual property rights for very specific technical implementations (for example, the raycasting technique used in Wolfenstein 3D) but you shouldn’t be able to patent the concept of the first person shooter itself. That feels more like restricting freedom of expression.
That being said, if they ever tried to hit anyone with the entirety of that, other than in a case of 1:1 replication of Pokemon, it would be a spurious weapon at best. There's too much prior art + alternative implementations in existence to argue for a unique and inventive mechanic.
Now, the monster design in pal world is (I think intentionally) very close to Pokemon’s, while also giving them guns, which I suspect is what triggered Nintendo’s action. You can find plenty of Pokemon likes that match its gameplay much closer (cassette beast, tented) that haven’t caused Nintendo’s ire.
Like you said besides the “balls” or “spheres” used for capture it’s a completely different game.
Sure it’s a “similar” genre, but they’re also targeting a different audience altogether.
O well guess the lawyers can duke it out in the courts.
Copyright is an artificial system propping up huge sections of the economy/whole industries. It's internal protectionism at best and hindering progress at worse. Nothing "free market" about it.
IP*
It looks like here, they picked minor game mechanics introduced in a later games that Palworld also used (possibly as a coincidence) and then applied for patents. Some of them passed.
It's not surprising that Nintendo wants to patent "summon creatures to fight for you" as a game mechanic, the surprising part is that the patent was granted.
Like how you "can't" patent stuff with prior art but then, somehow, big companies seem to be granted patents for things with plenty of prior art all the time?
In this specific case I don't know. I would have to ask.
Which is a big fucking problem, to be honest. I would not want to enter a lawsuit with Nintendo to try to convince a judge that the patent I'm clearly violating is invalid.
If I was making a game with capture/summon mechanics and got a call from Nintendo, I would probably take capture/summon mechanics out of my game if their lawyers were threatening enough. That's the value in unenforceable patents.
> If I was making a game with capture/summon mechanics and got a call from Nintendo, I would probably take capture/summon mechanics out of my game if their lawyers were threatening enough. That's the value in unenforceable patents.
It really depends? If you could hire a good patent lawyer for say $5k-$10k to dig up a reasonably correct answer for you, and that answer was "lol this patent is a joke, Nintendo will get quickly smacked out of court and all your attorney fees will get paid for by Nintendo", then maybe that would be sufficient if the cost to you to rework the mechanic would be order(s) of magnitude higher than $5k.
You're definitely right in that before you actually call their bluff and enter litigation, you'd want to be damn sure what you're getting in to.
It's probably a nonstarter for the current year, given that you'd need to pay for substantially more patent examiners, and better trained patent examiners (even if it does ultimately come a lot from increased fees). Or maybe fewer patent examiners but much more highly trained ones? I'm not sure how that would pan out.
But it would be very cool if the gap between "granted patent" and "proven useful patent" was closed substantially.
My question is whether this patent only covers specific game mechanics introduced in the most recent Pokemon game or whether it's broad enough to monopolize the entire genre. Because if a clone of the original Pokemon from 30 years ago (has it really been that long? I feel old) is infringing, then the patent is clearly invalid due to Nintendo's own prior art.
It's mostly trademarks with physical games, not patents.
But video games are ultimately software, and that's easy to patent...
Obviously there have been lots of other TCGs, but up until that patent expired in 2014, they had to either be sufficiently different from MtG to avoid the patent, or pay royalties to WOTC.
edit: to be clear, anyone can copy every single element of any board game, as long as they don't infringe on the game's copyrights or trademarks i.e. the art and the text, including the names of things. This is absolutely true in the US, but not necessarily true in other countries, and I'm pretty sure false in Germany. Also, there is a European alliance of board game designers who will blacklist retailers that sell your copied game, and the sites that promote it.
Monopoly harassed the game "Anti-Monopoly" forever over this, but eventually when the law became clear, realized they would lose, so settled by paying the designer and giving him a perpetual license to any IP involved in the mechanics of Monopoly so there wouldn't actually be a court decision recorded that officially invalidated their patents (I'm not sure if it was still Parker Brothers by the conclusion.) They could theoretically go after people still, and probably have sent letters (everybody who was going to get rich off the next big board game in the 60s and 70s made a Monopoly clone.) But after the Anti-Monopoly guy published about the experience, everybody knows that any threats are toothless.
when a dungeons and dragon magic user, uses summon monster, they may engage with these same described mechanics of summon and battle. [orb of monster summoning would be way out ]
I had thought there was case law along the lines of games have no utility and thus can't have utility patents. Although, perhaps that case was too old, and the rules have changed.
Assuming that games are subject to utility patents, I don't see why you couldn't hold a patent on a genre defining mechanic... But genere defining mechanics for a Pokemon game probably were in the first games from 1996, and afaik the patent backlog isn't that long that they'd be getting a patent today from an application from back then.
Are most software patents stupid and overly broad? Yes. Should this one have been granted? No. Is this going to stifle the industry? Highly unlikely.
The article itself is quite low-quality (as usual with articles where the title and subheadline are quotes) and I'd go as far as assume it's probably a PR piece placed by another player in the space.
I'm not suggesting that the current patent system works well, but you are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If profit margins are razor thin, the Apples and Amazons and Microsofts of the world can happily copy an idea and hold their breath far longer than a smaller competitor can.
The main text from what I understand is the claims in sections 37 to 41. Claim 1 is what I'm understanding the be the main claim, which can be summarized as summons that can either do manual combat or automatically battle after following a player around/being directed.
The other claims are to be taken individually, correct? If not, claim 10 (requiring attack of sub character and option for capture) would disqualify most non-capture games and would likely make this a non-issue, but if just the first claim needs to stand then this would be really broad (and from what I understand, prior art in that space would be easy to point to).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...