Patent attorney analyzes patent that Nintendo & The Pokemon Company may be suing Palworld over
Mario Bautista
The gaming community is still reacting to the big news that Nintendo and The Pokemon Company have filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair, the developers behind Palworld. What is interesting about the lawsuit is that it isn’t about copyright infringement, but patent rights. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company say that Palworld “infringes multiple patent rights”, but they don’t mention which ones specifically.
Well, patent attorney Kiyoshi Kurihara may have figured that out. Kurihara recently spoke to Yahoo Japan, where he discusses a patent, filed in 2021, which details the way that players can catch creatures they encounter, which would result in the creature belonging to them. It refers to how players look towards a “field character” in front of them, release a “capture item” that strikes that “field character”, and if they catch it, the creature then belongs to them.
The patent is obviously related to Pokemon’s Pokeballs, though it is worth noting that the patent’s setup seems to specifically resemble to how you catch Pokemon in Legends Arceus, which was released in 2022, rather than the traditional Pokemon games that have been releasing for decades. It is that Legends Arceus style of catching creatures that Palworld seems to have similarities to. Because of this, Kurihara mentions that, while it may not be the only patent that Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are referring to in their lawsuit, it may be the one that ultimately promoted both companies to take action in the first place. Kurihara is calling it the case’s “killer patient”.
Thanks to Paidenthusiast for the tip!
