Amid the Palworld lawsuit, Japan's Patent Office strikes down a related creature-capture patent for Nintendo, dealing a potential blow to the case.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/56559025

Japan’s patent office has rejected a Nintendo application related to its Palworld lawsuit, citing a lack of originality. The decision raises questions about the validity of several Nintendo patents describing creature capture systems that are central to the company’s complaint against Palworld.

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In late October 2025, the Japan Patent Office rejected Nintendo’s patent application no. 2024-031879, which is related to the family of creature-capture patents that Palworld is accused of infringing. A JPO patent examiner found that the application lacks originality to be deemed an invention, citing prior art such as Monster Hunter 4, ARK: Survival Evolved, gacha browser game Kantai Collection, Pocketpair’s own Craftopia, and even Pokemon GO. All of those were released prior to the December 2021 priority date from the rejected application.

Nintendo has 60 days from the date of its rejection notice to amend its application or appeal the decision, giving it until late December 2025 to do so. Since the application isn’t cited in the Palworld patent lawsuit directly, its rejection won’t have a direct impact on the ongoing case. However, as explained by Games Fray’s analyst Florian Mueller, the newly rejected application is a “key building block” in Nintendo’s strategy to capture a wide range of creature-capture system implementations. It is the child of patent JP7493117 and the parent of JP7545191, both of which are cited in Nintendo’s complaint.

tl:dr;

The Nintendo v PalWorld lawsuit is still on going, but Nintendo has been told it’s attempt to patent the concept of a capturable and summonable creature is invalid, in Japan.

As part of their ongoing lawsuit, Nintendo is claiming PalWorld has violated those… now invalid patents, so Nintendo’s overall case against PalWorld is now significantly more weak.

    • Womble@piefed.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Patents are fine, if someone discovers a good new way to do something they deserve some legal protection from those with huge legal and PR bugets swooping in and taking it for themselves.

      The way the patent system is abused is not fine, the number of trivial patents granted for things which are obvious next steps from existing things, and then using those as legal ammunition in shakedowns/scare offs of competetors is the issue.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        The patent system is fundamentally broken. It could be fixed, but right now, in the current state, it totally fails all its good for.

        • Patents can be filed with hardly any checks in place. The point of a patent office is to issue patents, not to issue valid patents. Validity is verified in court.
        • Patents don’t give you an actual claim to anything, only the right to sue, if you have enough money to afford a lawsuit. In patent court, running out of money is a common way to lose, which means that patent court strongly favours those with money.
        • Patents are really expensive. We are talking about tens of thousands of Euros.

        All that means that patents are completely unviable for the “small inventor” they were meant to protect. Patents largely function as a way for large corporations to bully smaller competitors out of the market.

        It is a totally viable strategy to get an invalid patent and use it to bully a smaller competitor off the market who can’t afford to invalidate your patent.

        As a small inventor patent law becomes an absolute minefield, since there’s hardly any way to find all the patents that you might accidentally violate with your invention.

        Follow-up patents (meaning, you change some minor detail when your patent runs out to artificially extend the life of your patent by getting a new patent on the slightly modified versions) also break the other goal of patents which was to force inventors to open-source their invention through the patent.

        So instead of a way to protect small inventors and making sure that ideas end up available to everyone, the current patent law does the exact opposite.

        • Womble@piefed.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          Those arent universal, for example to file a patent in the UK costs £310 and includes a substantive examination where the intelectual property office examine your proposed patent for novelty and validity.

          Again, I dont disagree that patent systems generally have significant problems and are abused routinely, but the point of giving time limited legal protections for people who invent something new and useful is a good one.

          • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 day ago

            The problem there is that an UK patent is practically worthless. For a patent to be somewhat worthwhile, you need an international one.

            • Womble@piefed.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              I think you are a bit misinformed on this, there is no such thing as an international patent. What there is is the patent cooperation treaty, where prety much all countries in the world co-ordinate patent filings against each other and allow you to file the same patent in lots of places. The UK gets you into that system as well as anywhere else.