With developer Pocketpair having made changes to Palworld that it had confirmed were done due to legal issues with Nintendo, it looks like the lawsuit might not yet be over. As caught by GamesRadar, intellectual property expert Florian Mueller described through Games Fray that Nintendo is making some “weird” moves with regards to its lawsuit against Pocketpair.
Noting that Pocketpair has kept up a strong defense against Nintendo’s accusations, the owner of the Pokemon IP had made modifications of the three patents over which it was suing the Palworld developer. Mueller wrote that, traditionally, litigants in a lawsuit don’t tend to make changes to their patents in the middle of a lawsuit “unless they feel the patent is at a fairly high risk of being deemed invalid in its original form.”
While litigants do sometimes “thread the needle” about this by amending their patents while also winning the lawsuit under the terms of the original patents, Mueller has said that “the way Nintendo has worded its new claims here is — to put it bluntly — weird, and doesn’t appear likely to solve Nintendo’s problems in this dispute.”
Quoting a machine translated version of the patent, Mueller also noted that the wording of the patent is “extremely contorted” in an effort to try and make things sound more complicated than they really are. He believes that this was done in an effort to obfuscate things. Check out the part of the patent quoted by Mueller below.
“…and even when any boarding character other than the aerial boarding character capable of moving in the air is the currently selected boarding character and a first operation input is given when the player character is in the air, the computer causes the aerial boarding character to appear in the virtual space, and causes the player character to board the aerial boarding character instead of the currently selected boarding character from among the boarding characters…“
The use of the word “even when” is also seemingly noteworthy, according to Mueller, since it is normally not found in patent claims. Describing the word as “too emphatic and subjective,” Mueller noted that the word “even” has no place in patent claims.
“I’ve been following patent litigation for 15 years (for the better part of that period as a consultant) and have seen many claims that were amended, but I’ve never seen ‘even when’ or ‘even if’ in a patent claim,” wrote Mueller. “It’s bizarre.”
Ultimately, Mueller believes that Nintendo’s efforts in Japan are “almost a Hail Mary” in what he describes as a desperate attempt by the company to win its lawsuit against Pocketpair. While the company might be on the back foot in Japan with regards to the lawsuit, however, its patent efforts in the US are seemingly not as weird.
While still making use of tautological phrasing like “selected based on the selection operation”, the company’s patent applications in the US have seemingly been presented in overall more sensible language, according to Mueller.
In the meantime, check out details about the Tides of Terraria update that was released for Palworld just last month. Palworld is available on PC, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
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