LogInNintendo's fight against Palworld might have horrible consequences.
The Pokémon Company
In just a week, Nintendo managed to get two patents that will help it in its legal battle against Palworld's creator Pocketpair, but the situation might affect more than a single company.
Yesterday, I expressed my concerns about the US courts basically letting Nintendo do whatever it wants, including acquiring patents and editing them to help it sue Pocketpair after Palworld's launch.
Kirk Sigmon, an attorney in Intellectual Property Litigation & Patent Prosecution, seems to agree. Just a reminder: one of the patents Nintendo got (No. 12,403,397) covers summoning a character and letting it fight enemies, a description so broad that almost any game could potentially be under fire.
"Broadly, I don't disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents," said Sigmon (via PC Gamer). "They have been an embarrassing failure of the US patent system."
He thinks that both '397 and the second one, No. 12,409,387, which talks about "smooth switching or riding objects," represent irregularities in the decision-making of US patent officials.
Most of the claims made in the '387 patent's case, US Patent No. 12,246,255, were accepted by the USPTO from the start, which is "a very unusual result: most claims are rejected at least once."
"This seems like a situation where the USPTO essentially gave up and just allowed the case, assuming that the claims were narrow or specific enough to be new without evaluating them too closely," Sigmon said. "I strongly disagree with this result: In my view, these claims were in no way allowable."
The '397 patent's acceptance was even more shocking, as it could open the gates of endless lawsuits for Nintendo.
"Like the above case, the reasons for allowance don't give us even a hint of why it was allowed: the Examiner just paraphrases the claims (after block quoting them) without explaining why the claims are allowed over the prior art," Sigmon shared. "This is extremely unusual and raises a large number of red flags."
Its allowance was, apparently, based on a review of only 16 US patents, 7 Japanese patents, and one article from a Pokémon site – a surprisingly small number of materials.
"I have no earthly idea how the Examiner could, in good faith, allow this application so quickly," Sigmon said. "This allowance should not have happened, full stop."
He thinks it's "not impossible" to be sued for patent infringement with this case in action, "even when a claim infringement argument is weak, and bad patents like this cast a massive shadow on the industry."
Considering Nintendo's love for suing everything it can, this might stifle competition, making other companies think twice before using a system that looks like one from Nintendo's games even remotely, which, of course, leads to a monopoly.
"In my opinion, none of the three patents I've discussed here should have been allowed. It's shocking and offensive that they were," Sigmon said. "The USPTO dropped the ball big time, and it's going to externalize a lot of uncertainty (and, potentially, litigation cost) onto developers and companies that do not deserve it."
He believes that "that's the kind of thing that patents are meant to do," to protect people, not allow a "big player to game the system, get an overly broad patent that they should have never received in the first place, and then go around bullying would-be competition with the threat of a legally questionable lawsuit."
This is probably the loudest patent case in the industry in a long while, so perhaps the roar will influence the ruling eventually.
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