Nintendo, Pokémon Co. Sue Pocketpair Over ‘Palworld’ For… Patent Infringement?

Well, it took awhile, but we finally got here. Earlier this year, we discussed the game Palworld shortly after its release. It made our pages because the game is clearly partially inspired by the Pokémon series of video games, with some very stark differences. Similarities aside, the characters in the game are certainly different than those in Pokémon games, coupled with the use of firearms in the game along with other game mechanics that made it demonstrably different than any other game. As we highlighted at the time, this made Palworld something of an example of how the idea/expression dichotomy works and we warned that, while Nintendo or The Pokémon Co. might eventually pursue legal action over the game, a copyright suit ought to have a hard time surviving a defense using that dichotomy.

Which is why, while I wasn’t terribly surprised to learn that Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. have in fact sued Pocketpair over its Palworld game, I sure wasn’t expecting to learn that it was doing so over patent infringement.

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced they have filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair, the makers of the heavily Pokémon-inspired Palworld. The Tokyo District Court lawsuit seeks an injunction and damages “on the grounds that Palworld infringes multiple patent rights,” according to the announcement.

Beyond mere copyright concerns, though, Nintendo’s lawsuit announcement specifically alleges patent infringement on the part of Palworld (though this difference could come down to vagaries of translation from the original Japanese). A lawsuit over patents would seemingly require some unique game mechanic or feature that has been specifically granted stronger protections by the patent office. While the Pokémon Company does hold a number of (US) patents, most of them seem to deal with various server communications methods or the sleep monitoring capabilities of Pokémon Sleep.

Adding to the mystery in all of this is that nobody but the plaintiffs seems to have any idea what these patents that were infringed upon could be. I tend to agree that perhaps there’s a translation issue at work here and this really is instead a copyright and/or trademark infringement suit, but we’ll have to wait for more to come out to see.

If it is patents, I’ll be surprised. I’ll be even more surprised if there is any validity to such a patent infringement claim. That’s just not typically how these things in the video game industry work.

But if it really is a trademark and/or copyright claim, it should fail and fail hard… if this suit were brought in the United States. In Japan, however, it’s more complicated. Japanese copyright law does not have an explicit idea/expression dichotomy in the way US copyright law has, but the courts there do sometimes give a nod to and use it in a similar way.

But any sane copyright law would allow for games to be inspired by, but not replicas of, an original work. The whole point of copyright generally is not to allow any one entity own the concepts that go into a video game, but instead the specific expression of the same. And, for what it’s worth, Pocketpair too appears to be confused as to what this is all about.

“We have received notice of this lawsuit and will begin the appropriate legal proceedings and investigations into the claims of patent infringement,” Pocketpair says in a statement. “At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details.”

And so now we wait to see what the actual details here are. Frankly, sans some translation issue, none of this makes much sense to me. And while Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. certainly have shown themselves to be willing to stretch IP laws to be the bully generally, this seems to go beyond the norm.