Welp, I had no plans of buying Palworld. I’ve been playing Enshrouded instead. But I’ll be picking it up now. Screw you Nintendo and your anticompetitive ways.
Palworld has to be the most addicted I’ve ever been to a game in years, and that was back at launch in January. I’m not going to spoil anything, but they’ve added a ton of new things since!
Palworld is a lot of fun you won’t regret it
Thank you for reminding me about Enshrouded. I started playing that a few months ago, but a week into it my gamer friends wanted to start a new Valheim playthrough, and that was that. I should revisit it though
If I didn’t have friends who need so much financial help, I’d buy it too.
I’d support anything to see NIntendo get kicked in the nuts for shutting down yuzu, which could have easily continued legally by removing like 2 paragraphs and probably a few lines of code.
Also Citra which was 100% legal.
Rooting for Nintendo on this one. Palworld was dumb, you can’t just steal others’ IP without consequences. They could have made things just different enough… But they didn’t, they were dumb.
Patenting vague game mechanics is egregious. This would be like Insomniac patenting “character runs around with a big gun” and subsequently filing a lawsuit against Nintendo for Splatoon, because both Ratchet and the Inklings run around with big guns.
I can read the room here. I know this will be an unpopular opinion, and I want to preface this with a big “fuck Nintendo” and particularly their legal team.
That said, fuck Palworld, too. They are absolutely just straight up copying Nintendo/The Pokemon Company’s designs. It’s blatant. It’s AI bros making money by copying Pokemon designs, plain and simple. Palworld would not have caused the stir it did if not for the blatant “It’s Pokemon with guns!” angle.
So, while Nintendo can normally go suck the biggest of dicks when they swing around their lawsuit arms, this time I think they fully have every right to go after these guys, I don’t care how much they say they’re gonna fight the big bad mega company “for the fans and for indie devs everywhere” lol man, great statement. Guaranteed to get the base riled up.
Thank you for reading, you may downvote.
They didn’t copy Pokemon, they created new content that is similar to Pokemon.
Do you believe it is wrong to create new content that is very similar to existing content that people enjoy?
Is it wrong for Pocket Pair (Palworld’s creator) to create new content that is similar to existing Pokemon? Is it wrong for GameFreak to create new content that is similar to existing Pokemon? Morally speaking, why are the answers to those questions different?
I really recommend this set of posts from byofrog from the hellsite:
https://x.com/byofrog/status/1749198773295743156
https://x.com/byofrog/status/1748943929184035098
https://x.com/byofrog/status/1749188773127016772
https://x.com/byofrog/status/1749193341932020097
https://x.com/RoseBursyoji/status/1750585839913255386 (This one is not from byofrog, but rather his comment section)
I think they make the copying obvious
Ah, I remember this controversy when the game launched. That person later admitted to modifying the meshes to make them fit better because they hated Palworld for “glorifying animal abuse”.
The article, which you provided does not make sense.
They quote the user in question, with text and link to their tweet and then have the link to the “confession” as just text, not clickable. Opening the link results in an error. Looking at the link though, you can see, that this was not even posted by the user in question.
You can see, who posted the post, which you are linking, in the url. This is a post from the user in question for example.
The provided evidence links to a (now apparently deleted) tweet from another user instead.
You are right about the user speaking out because of the animal abuse though. (source)
And they did scale the mashes (source), but only to make them comparable, because the different engines of these games work differently and have different scales. They did not edit them in other ways.
If you can’t see how blatant it is, I don’t know what to tell you. You can be all “it’s just SIMILAR wink wink” all you want. Similar is a fucking understatement.
Have you played Pokémon and PalWorld? One is a pit-fighter-trainer where the other is a base-builder. Or does the capturing of creatures and the similar art style make them too much alike?
In a truly competitive capitalist market there should be room enough for both. But Nintendo wants their players to be obligated to own only Nintendo approved products.
Have you? The monster designs, some of them are straight up copycats and pallette swaps and such. Others are basically that “ok copy my homework, but don’t make it identical so we don’t get in trouble.”. It is absolutely pushing the limits. To say you do not see that is willful. It has to be.
So Nintendo is suing them over the monster design similarities? I thought it was a patent suit, not copyright.
Whatever. I can talk about whatever I want.
Pokemon concept and ideas are heavily borrowed already. It is pretty idiotic to pretend they created anything. Instead they copied a bunch of Japanese culture and now want to prevent others from doing the same.
I just don’t believe in copyright, IP or having fences on human culture.
So even if they straight up put Pikachu in their game I think they have the moral right to do so. If they can make a good game with Pikachu in it, who is Nintendo to private humanity from that piece of culture?
My statement is about morality. What’s legal or not is another matter.
I’m not extremely against all of copyright because I believe artists should have some protections (though the law sucks at this), but I also believe that once something becomes a decades-old billion-dollar franchise, non-identical imitation should be fair game. Can you imagine what would happen if companies could simply say that they own whole genres?
I mean…artists should be paid for their work right? Fuck Nintendo, but that same logic could be applied to anyone. I’d be pissed if someone just straight up lifted my designs and resold it.
Absolutely. I don’t get how someone can say stealing the work of others is morally correct.
Are you talking about some heist on Nintendo’s blueprint vaults?
Because IP infringement is never theft.
because work should provide limited profit
They are also making a copycat game “inspired” by hollow knight, obviously doing for the indie devs out there.
That’s called a metroidvania
Of course. For the culture! Lol
If we allow this to continue, we will end up with more content for players to enjoy.
If we allow this to continue, we will end up with more content for players to enjoy.
More slop that’s copy and pasted from other games?
No, I don’t think I want that, thanks though.
Yeah of course, they are only going to ripoff others indie devs out there for the players to enjoy.
Name a game you have enjoyed that isn’t a ripoff.
Tetris.
Granted
Tetris.
pentomino Would like a word…
Or jigsaw puzzle, the thing is there’s nothing 100% original and people always get inspired by others.
Things is starting to get strange when a company only makes games there have the same aesthetic of a more famous game.
This isn’t Genshin is Craftopia
This isn’t Hollow Knight is Never GraveMetroidvania and the Open World of Genshin is nothing new, Genshin share a lot of similarities with BOTW and have the combat animation similar to Nier:Automata but this company tried a lot to differentiate only in the mechanics of the game while coping the aesthetics.
Fuck Nintendo and miHoYo but come on don’t go and tried to emulate the aesthetic of a indie developer and than say “fight Nintendo lawsuit on behalf of fans and indie developers”.
Good call, the shape arranging mechanic existing in board game form before Tetris, and the “challenge approaching from the top of the screen” thing was a staple of many many Atari and arcade games.
I love how you wrote all this, and are completely missing the mark. Nintendo is filing a lawsuit claiming that the palworld devs violated their patents, not their copyrights.
Anything palworld ‘copied’ from pokémon is either japanese lore, or from older games. This is not a copyright suit. If a copyright suit were possible, Nintendo would have brought it waaaay earlier. I’m wondering which patents Nintendo has that were supposedly violated.
I love how there’s this entire discussion here about copyright etc… while that’s not even what this is about.
I bet Nintendo has a lot of patent violations to choose from. They have a patent on such bangers as, rephrased from legal speech to human speech: “An air mount automatically turning into a ground mount upon landing” Source
According to Nintendo, if I understand this correctly, they have the sole legal right to make a bird mount that can also sprint on the ground if needed, because that sure was a special idea.
Palworld is just one of them Newgrounds games where its Mario but he’s got a Bazooka or some crazy shit.
Whenever I run into someone with a Palworld Oc and their telling me about it, I cant help but feel like their offering me some kinda fake/knockoff Balenciaga; for lack of a better comparison. Like it looks like Lugia, flaps like Lugia, but this “thing” aint Lugia. Its- I dunno its just weird as shit.
Its an uncanniness for me, that’s why I hate it and it feels wrong. My mind sees Jigglypuff with a pistol and I’m violently taken out of the scenario. Its just so- Fuckin weird man I cant describe it. It aint natural 😭😭
The best way I describe it is that Palworld is the Alternate Universe version of Pokemom, only it exists in this universe and in this timeline and it weirds me out.
I think you could be right, but it depends on the details Nintendo comes out with. I remember people were saying that they thought certain Palworld monsters had been ripped from the Pokemon games and recolored - if Nintendo can demonstrate that, then that’s a slam dunk for them.
But if it’s just creature designs and collecting them, then I just don’t think that “a cute monkey with green fur” is a novel enough concept to be defensible against someone else doing something similar.
I’m not going to downvote you, but, I disagree. Nintendo might have had a leg to stand on if they tried to say Palworld infringed on their Pokemon intellectual property and/or copyright, especially after the mesh controversy, but they didn’t attack them on that. They’re going after Pocketpair for patent infringement on a so-far undisclosed patent. Probably a game mechanic of some sort. Pokemon did not invent the monster collecting and/or battling genre. Dragon Quest predates it by a good margin.
I’d like to see the patent they claim to have. In what way might Palworld be infringing upon their patent that another similar game, like say TemTem for instance, is not? I hate the idea that a fun game mechanic can be patented and locked down by one company for up to 20 years.
Palworld would not have caused the stir it did if not for the blatant “It’s Pokemon with guns!” angle.
This was 100% a fan reaction to the trailer, and not an official stance by the developers at all. That’s obviously what they were going for, but they stopped long before outright saying it out loud and let the consumer make their own inferences.
They have every right to go after them, but I really hope they lose this one. Nintendo doesn’t deserve to have a monopoly on fun creature collecting games.
Absolutely. I’m looking at getting Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince soon. I doubt anyone calls it a Pokemon copycat, too.
I still really hate Palworld.
It reminds me of that PETA parody I played a long time ago called Pokemon Black and Blue. It was pokemon but they were abused or some shit.
Thats what Palworld reminds me of, Its pokemon but I can abuse them if I want to and thats just kinda fucked up IMO… Not something id wanna play :/ It all reminds me of those fangames people would make where Mario has a gun or a car or some other wacky ass Item that’d only exist IRL. the fucking pink Meowth with an AK-47 makes me ponder why this even got as popular as it did. but whatever- this is all still my opinion.
This game also reminds me of that one Steam game thats basically Animal crossing (But you can kill people with guns) I think its called Virst Winter??? I cant remember… It just looks mega silly to me- I dont like having to look at a fake-Lucario with human hands holdin a glock. Its goofy- I cant take it seriously 😭😭😭
Man… Reading is great when I decide to actually do that.
aight. Ima piss off, Apologies for my Prozax induced rantings.
Pocketpair is a Japanese company too right? That doesn’t bode well, Japan has some shit laws for defending these sorts of lawsuits. I really like palworld, and don’t want it to go away. Fuck Nintendo.
Copyright only exists for the wealthy to own even more.
This is a patent lawsuit, not copyright
even worse. software patents are just more idiotic copyrights.
Dunno, I think I prefer patents. Unlike copyright, patents usually last a flat twenty years. Copyright expires either after 95 years or 70 years after the death of the author, which is ludicrous. Both are constantly abused, but at least patents expire in a reasonable amount of time.
patents and copyright are pretty different though. IMO both are bad but you can at least make a case for protecting intelectual work from copying. Patents protect replication of ideas and ideas don’t have to be unique at all. If I say it was my idea to call variables a,b,c,d,e in that order that means anyone who wants to do that in their creations needs my permission which is fucking bonkers.
I’m convinced that software patents exist purely for regulatory capture.
Might be about a design patent
Idk about that, maybe indefinite copyrights would be but limited term is entirely fair. Like imagine you spend 5 years and $50M to develop something (random numbers here), then the next day someone just copies it and sells it cheaper since they had no overhead in copying your product. There’s no incentive to create if all it does is put you in debt, so we do need copyrights if we want things. However Pokemon came out in 96, that’s 28 years. There’s been very little innovation in their games since. And seeing as Digimon wasn’t sued it’s not about the monsters, it’s about the balls. But those balls haven’t changed in almost three decades so I don’t think the really have a case to complain
Pokemon: The innovative RPG where you couldn’t even walk diagonally until generation 6…
How about no. Let people create if your only incentive is money fuck you. If someone spent $50 million to develop something the labor has been paid. You will be first to the market and you can make money if your invention isn’t that unique oh well.
Thats a great way to make companies spend 0 on r&d that has longterm benefits and instead focus on squeezing out every penny from current assets.
Want to make something, the people eho want it pay to make it happen, once it’s done and paid for, it belongs to everyone. I rather live in the star citizen dystopia than the Disney vampire dystopia.
Making an unlimited reproducible resource artificially scarce for 160 years is really fucking evil parasiticism.
I dont think anyone here thinks that the ridiculous terms on current IP laws make sense (at least I havent seen anyone defending them), but there is a big difference between a short term of 5-10 years for you to get the earned benefits of an innovation you created and zero protection where a larger more well funded company can swoop in copy your invention and bury you in marketing so they get the reward.
Intellectual property has been abused beyond recovery, we need an entirely new paradigm. Duration of right is just a tiny part of it. Any system that turns the infinite resource into an artificial scarcity is fundamentally evil.
So you tax the fuck out of them and fund invention though schools and unis. But the fact companies won’t is not a sure thing… it just means they will be more pickey.
The people spending 5 years to develop something arent the ones that own the rights to the end product. Like I said, copyright exists so rich people can own more. The people that own the rights to pokemon are not game developers, artists, writers, anyone that put actual work into creating the games and other media. Its people that had a lot of money, shareholders and executives. And then they receive the biggest share of the profits off others work and the feedback loop continues.
The problem is that IP laws eventually are lobbied by the big copyright holders into being excessively long. How long did Steamboat Willie really have to be copyrighted for, and has their release into the public domain really affected Disney?
Eventually after you get back the money you invested, it’s just free money, and people like free money so much they pay lawyers and lobbyists that free money so that they can keep it coming.
However Pokemon came out in 96, that’s 28 years. There’s been very little innovation in their games since.
First, not really, there’s been a LOT of innovation in Pokémon, as much as people want to deny it.
And second, 28 years is really not that much. We’re not in the Disney realm of copyright-hogging, I think 50 years is a fair amount of time. The issue is that it’s often way too broad: it should protect only extremely blatant copies (i.e. the guy who literally rereleased Pokémon Yellow as a mobile game), not concepts or general mechanics. Palworld has a completely different gameplay from any Pokémon game so far, and (most of) the creatures are distinct enough. That should suffice to make it rightfully exist (maybe removing the 4/5 Pals that are absolute ripoffs, sure).
50 years… 5 maybe. If you have not earned back your investment by then you are just squatting on it.
50 years is already excessive, dude or dudette. The north american law originally gave 14 years, plus another 14 years if the creators actively sought after and were approved (most did not even ask, and approval was not guaranteed). This is comparable time to patents, which serve the exact same function, but without the absurd time scales (Imagine if Computers were still a private tech of IBM … those sweet mainframes the size of a room). 28 years, or lets put 30 years fixed at once, is more than sufficient time for making profit for the quasi totality of IPs that would make a profit (and creators can invest the money received to gain more, or have 30 years to think of something else). 30 years ago was 1994, think of everything the Star Wars prequels have sold, now remeber the 1st film was from 1999, would star wars prequels ventures really suffer if they started losing the IP from 2029 onwards ?
I still think if copyright laws weren’t so oppressive, 50 years would be fair (And still a huge improvement from the current situation).
Maybe have it in tiers or something? First 10 years: full copyright - until 30: similar products allowed, but no blatant reproduction - until 50: reproduction allowed as long as it’s not for-profit - post 50: public domain?
Humm…, i don’t think this scheme would work out in practice. The definitions of several concepts are fuzzy, and therefore can be circumvented or challenged or abused by all sides of the equation. What is a ‘similar product’ that is allowed after 30 years (and therefore what is a ‘dissimilar product’ that would be forbidden before), how would a non-profit that just pays high salaries to its managers fare between the marks of 30 and 50 years (and just gives some little money to research or charity). And again, why give artists and creative companies so much more time of IP protection than we give STEM inventors and companies time in patents (this random site claims patents last 15 to 20 years only) ?
I think 50 is generally too much, but I think it should depend on categories, so that it is based upon the efforts put into an idea to create and how much it value (like in expected ROI).
I fear, that is hard to define
As an artist 20-50 depending on context is where I’m hovering. It is very hard to define.
I agree with you almost entirely, but if we’re being honest, there really hasn’t been a lot of innovation in their games since Gen 4, and that was almost 20 years ago. Once they figured out the physical/special split, nothing really changed in the major mechanics. They have a new gimmick mechanic every game, like Z-Moves or Dynamax, but they’re always dropped by the next game. I guess camping/picnics are evolving into a new feature, but that’s about it.
If we’re talking PvP, battling has constantly evolved through new abilities, even without gimmicks the way the game is played changed a lot through the years.
In single player they also changed a lot of stuff since gen 4, although the positive changes were mostly in gen 5/6 and the later ones like wild areas and the switch to “””open world””” were… not as well received.
Well, I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. To me, most of the updates have been set dressing, not significant changes to the formula or gameplay. But I guess that’s a matter of opinion, not fact.
This isn’t about copyright. Is there anybody here that has actually read the article? It’s absolutely insane how everyone just opens their mouths without understanding anything.
Consider it a catch all term for “copying intellectual property”. Patents, copyrights, trademarks, its different words for the same idea.
Even when it doesn’t, it becomes its eventual outcome.
No, Copyright exists to protect creators. It’s just been perverted and abused by the wealthy so that they can indefinitely retain IP. Disney holding on to an IP for 70 years after an author dies is messed up, but Disney taking your art and selling it to a mass audience without giving you a dime is worse.
What creator has been protected by copyright?
Holy fuck I see some stupid takes posted here but this might be the stupidest.
Literally everyone who’s ever written a book, recorded a song, painted a painting, or created any other artwork.
Books and song rights go to the publisher. Graphic artists generally dont own their art they make money from, I.E. illustrations or concept art for various things like shows, movies, games.
First of all, no, publishers don’t necessarily own the copyright. Most authors do a licensing deal with a publisher, but they retain the copyright to their work. My understanding is that music industry contracts vary a lot more, since music is usually more collaborative, but lots of artists still own the rights to their songs. But even if that were true, artists being forced to sell their rights to cooperations isn’t an issue with copyright, it’s an issue with capitalism. It’s like blaming America’s shitty healthcare on doctors instead of a for-profit system controlled by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
A licensing deal for rights to make money off an intellectual property. I.E. a way to use their wealth to profit even more off something they didnt make. Music industry has fun examples of musicians having to rerecord songs because an ex-record label still owned rights to the original. So there’s situations where a musician entirely created and recorded a song and isnt allowed to sell that recording. And authors and musicians are the closest to owning their work they make a living off of. Any kind of industry visual artist has no ownership of anything.
Copyright is an issue with capitalism. It only exists for wealthy to profit off of.
I’ve run out of ways to tell you that’s not correct. The explicit purpose of the copyright law in the constitution is to allow creators to profit from their work. If you’re arguing that we should live in a pure communist society, where the products of all labor, including intellectual property, belong to community, fine, but we don’t live in a communist utopia. We live in a capitalist hellscape, and you’re looking at one of the only protections artists have, seeing how it’s been exploited by capitalism, and claiming the protection is the problem. It’s like looking at the minimum wage, seeing how cooperations have lobbied Congress to keep it so low it’s now starvation wage, and coming to the conclusion that the minimum wage needs to be abolished.
Anyone who creates anything? If not for copyright Steam would be a sea of games named Undertale Stardew Valley Elsa Spider-Man
Youre thinking of the google play store
lmao
You would deprive everyone of the joy of playing this game mashup!?
I know you are joking, but honestly we would have a lot better games if we were allowed to openly borrow and build off of other concepts including characters and storylines.
Simply put commercial interests don’t produce the best games. Instead of innovative gameplay we get loot boxes and micro transactions.
A great example of this is Pokemon. You know damn well that fans could make a better Pokemon game than Nintendo ever could.
Copyright cannot protect 99% of creators because enforcing it takes enormous amounts of time and money. This isn’t really a big deal though because 99% of people who create don’t need these supposed protections.
That’s right, the amount of writing, art, and music that is created for non-commercial purposes dwarfs what is created for profit.
Your last tidbit is highly accurate. Big business almost exclusively uses copyright to control others work to the detriment of society.
Right, but as I said to someone else in this thread, the fact thar copyright can’t protect 99% of creators is a problem with capitalism, not copyright. The fact that our courts favor the wealthy isn’t the fault of copyright law itself.
Also, you’re correct that most art is created for pleasure, not profit, but that doesn’t mean the need to protect artists’ rights to their creations isn’t necessary, even beyond capitalistic reasons. Bill Waterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, refused to merchandise his art simply because he didn’t want to ruin the image of his characters for a licensing deal. Without copyright law, any company could have slapped his characters on t-shirts and coffee mugs to make a quick buck off of his labor. But because of copyright law, he was able to refuse his publisher’s attempts to franchise his characters (reportedly, he even turned down Spielberg and Lucas’ pitch for an animated series based on the strip).
I think you have bought into the lie about copyright that has been fed to us. It is really hard to look at something objectively when you have been propagandized about it your entire life.
Currently copyright and the bigger category of intellectual property only exist to benefit commercial interests, this is self-evident. It is not a natural right by any means and is a perversion of the way art and science has existed for all of human history.
We have to face the reality that in a world of billions of people nothing is really unique. If you are anything like me you would have had many great thoughts, ideas, and projects and seen many other people throughout your life with similar or sometimes identical concepts.
Who should get to rent seek for these? If I create a very similar painting or song without ever seeing or hearing of another similar one who is the first? Well the current system is first come first serve, but is that really right?
What about teachers. Should not your teacher get a portion of your creation since they inspired you? What about exposure to other art, should you pay a portion of your earnings if you were inspired by other artist?
Even when looking at case law with derivative works, what is or is not okay is hardly settled and constantly changes based on the whims of ill-informed judges.
These questions only begin to scratch the complexity of the situation because of the artificial constraints put on us by intellectual property. I don’t pretend to have the answers except to say there really is no need for any of this.
Even when looking at something you may think is relatively simple like putting a characters likeness on merchandise it is never cut and dry. I have often wondered if Tigger inspired Hobbes. The likeness including even behavior is rather startling.
Who has the rights is sometimes not even the person that created it originally. This is especially evident in productions that require lots of people like movies. This leads to interesting facts like most major recording artist don’t even own their own songs.
Commercial interests love to have it both ways as well. Microsoft used piracy to its advantage to spread its OS across the globe and only cracked down on it after becoming a monopoly.
I am not trying to muddy the waters here but I want to make it clear that intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests. It was ill-conceived from the start, based on false premises, and has been pushed to the breaking point from years of coordinated legal tactics.
intellectual property, including copyright was created by and for monied interests.
It’s literally the opposite. The first copyright law was passed in 1709 in England to give authors rights to their works instead of publishing companies. The Stationers’ Company, a guild of publishers, had a monopoly over the printing industry, and they we’re deciding amongst themselves who would get to reproduce and publish books. They took the labor of authors, changed it however they saw fit, and reproduced them for profit. Authors never saw a dime, and instead had to find wealthy patrons to subsidize their work.
Yes, for the majority of human history, people used to create art with no expectation of ownership, but for the majority of human history, there weren’t methods to mass reproduce art. Owning the rights to your books didn’t matter when the only way a second could get made is if a monk decided to hand copy it and bind it himself. When the only way to reproduce your painting was to have someone create a forgery, ownership of the physical copy was all that really mattered. If the only way you could get paid for a song was to sing it at the local tavern, it didn’t really matter if you got writing credits.
We’ve already seen a world where the cooperations that control media production can use any work they want. They carved up artists’ works like mobsters dividing up a town and kept all the profits for themselves. Maybe if we lived in a post need, post currency society, you could make an argument for abolishing copyright, but in the system we have, copyright is the only protection artists have against cooperations.
The commoner could not read or write in 1709. Even back then the law was meant for the upper class hence monied interests. So not the opposite at all. Wealthy using the law to protect their profits seems to be what has always happened. Hard to look at this as a some sort of positive for people like you and me.
What you describe is exactly what is happening in the majority of commercial writing nowadays. The corporations still have complete control. Strange how the law didn’t change the status quo rather just carved out an exception for wealthy writers to be rent seekers. Once again, anyone without the means would have their work copied with no recourse.
Copying is not a bad thing as it is the foundation of all human culture. Trying to create a artificial system of scarcity perhaps made some sense to commercial interests when publishing cost so much. With the Internet though and our fast past culture it really is a ridiculous concept nowadays.
Once again owning the rights to your work doesn’t matter unless a corporation wants to reprint, distribute your material, or in modern times allow you on their platform. Copyright would never stop this.
Even to this day the majority of those who create art don’t expect compensation. Most do it for fun as a creative outlet. This obsession with trying to conflate art with profit has always been a lie. Only an extreme minority of people will ever make money from their art. So we are all to bow down to them copying our culture?
They did not create anything in a vacuum and they refuse to recognize this. This is what I mean when I say it is a flawed premise. We don’t need to commercialize art to promote it.
We don’t need to concentrate wealth for rent seekers and lawyers by creating a system of artificial scarcity. This does not promote the arts or protect them in any meaningful way.
Copyright does not protect the vast majority of artists because they don’t need it and if they did would not have the resources or time to access our dubious legal frameworks in a court of law. It is a broken idea turned into a broken system.
First of all, literacy rates were about 70% in 1710, so the average commoner could absolutely read (at least among men, but copyright law isn’t to blame for patriarchy). This is about 300 years after the printing press, literacy had gone up.
Second…I just don’t know what to say to this anymore. You’ve created a strawman artist who believes their work is entirely original, even though no artist would claim they had no influences. You’re pretending that copyright is an edict that says ideas can never be shared, as though the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and fair use didn’t exist, or Substantial Similarity didn’t have to be proved (which, by the way, is the reason that Hobbes isn’t infringing on Tigger). And worst of all, you’re acting like artists who want to be paid for their art are greedy capitalists, not artists that live under capitalism. How is an artist who wants make a living by creating art all day, every day, somehow less worthy than an artist who works 9 to 5 at a crappy job and then does art when they have free time?
You seem to think abolishing copyright will lead to some sort of artists’ uptopia, but it’s pretty much the opposite. Let’s say copyright disappeared tomorrow. First, anyone making a living on Patreon will basically be done. If their videos or podcasts are now public property, there’s nothing to stop anyone from uploading their Premium Content to YouTube within minutes of publishing, so no one’s going to subscribe. Some of them will keep producing things, but since they’ll need a new source of income, they’ll definitely produce less.
Then there’s the cooperations. They’ll gobble up everything they can. Sure, you’ll be able to make your own Spider-Man comics, but if any publisher likes them, they’ll just sell them, along with any original IP you have. Of course you’ll be able to sell them too, but since they can afford more advertising, higher quality printing, and merchandising, they’ll out-sell you easily. You’ll be lucky it anyone’s even seen or heard of your version, even though you’re the author. It’d be like trying to compete with Coca-Cola by opening a lemonade stand, and Coke is allowed to use your lemonade recipe.
I’m not saying copyright is being done well now; cooperations have an outsized ability to enforce copyright claims, they’ve manipulated the law to retain IP for an insane amount of time, and they have far more power in negotiations over licensing and rights than artists do. But your solution to that is, “What if artists had no rights? That would be better!” and I’ve just…I’ve run out of ways to react to that. It’s truly insane to me.
“Multiple patents”
Specifies none
Off to a great start, I see. I know that actual game mechanics cannot be patented or copyrighted (the same principle applies to non digital games), so I’m really curious to what these patents are.
“Method for releasing 927 iterations of the same stale game across multiple platform generations.”
It can’t possibly be for “Method of splitting one complete game into two mutually exclusive cartridges with separate rosters to entice whales to buy two copies,” because if it were they’d have already sued Capcom 15 years ago.
You’ve mixed copyright and patents together and confused yourself a bit. Game mechanics cannot be copyrighted, but they can be patented. Some game component designs can be copyrighted as well, and even trademarked.
There are many, many, many game mechanics and features which have been patented, such as in-game chat, minigames on loading screens, arrow pointing to destination, and so on. Game studios have to license those features from the patent holders if they wish to use them.
Some random company even owns a patent for the concept of sending and receiving email on a mobile device. The entire system is a fucking joke.
There is an era of patents from the late 90s through the early-mid-00s that were insanely vague and rarely stand up to scrutiny, but most are expiring at this point, if they haven’t already. Generally, though, patents are not granted on “concepts” but on implementations. That’s a sometimes ambiguous line, but that’s a fundamental principle of modern patents.
Someone linked a list of all the patents Pokemon Company specifically holds and the very first one was “creature breeding based on good sleep habits.”
- How does that even get a patent?
- What the fuck iteration of Pokemon requires you to have good sleep habits to breed your pokemon? 🤨
- Does it actually help you sleep? 🤔 I might need to start breeding pokemon…
I know for sure that palworld does not promote good sleeping habits in any shape or form, at least not to my addicted ass
Pokemon Sleep, sleep tracking app
It’s real, folks.
Breed me, daddy.
Game mechanics can be patented. It’s stupid, but things such as “loading screen mini games” and “overhead arrows pointing to your objective” have been patented. The second I believe even got enforced once.
I think these kind of things have been getting approved less and less, but I wouldn’t be surprised if “balls that contain monsters” was patented back in the early days too.
The game during loading screen isn’t a “game mechanic” per se, which is why I think it was patented back then. Completely ass backwards that it could be patented, but there’s that.
As for the overhead arrow for navigation, I wasn’t aware of that one. Was that from EA? I think it can be argued that’s not a “game mechanic” either, because it’s not “an essential component of the game”
It was crazy taxi and no other game could use the mechanic. And telling you where to go is pretty darn important to a lot of games
Interesting… The Wikipedia page for Crazy Taxi talks about their lawsuit with Simpsons Road Rage in 2001, for using the overhead arrow among other complaints. But makes no mention at all of Midnight Club, who by 2005 when I got Midnight Club 3 DUB Edition was using that same overhead arrow for in-race directions. I don’t see screenshots of Midnight Club 1 or 2 having the arrow but I can guarantee from personal experience that MC3:DUB did have them. I wonder what happened in those four years that made Rockstar not afraid to use that mechanic, especially as this section on the Crazy Taxi page states
The case, Sega of America, Inc. v. Fox Interactive, et al., was settled in private for an unknown amount. The 138 patent is considered to be one of the most important patents in video game development.
I know that actual game mechanics cannot be patented or copyrighted
In America, sure. But these are two Japanese companies…
I’m not an expert on Japanese copyright and patent law, but I don’t have a great outlook for Palworld.
Good. Kick Nintendo in the dick.
Fuck Nintendo. I think Palworld is a stupid game that I wouldn’t ever bother to play but Nintendo is pure evil and they NEED to lose. They do not deserve a monopoly on whatever type of genre that is.
While I think it is a great spin on the genre of collecting monsters to enslave them so they craft bullets for you, I agree with you on Nintendo.
Oh that sounds cool actually
You know Nintendo is just weird.
They file a patent lawsuit against an indie game, just because someone finally got popular. But why don’t thay sue digimon or blue dragon, and while their at it, howtotrain a dragon while their at it.
This whole thing is just weird.
The really odd but is being unaware of which patents they’re allegedly infringing on
That should be part of the filing shouldn’t it?
Also are they going to sue Square Enix for Dragon Quest Monsters while they’re at it?
Maybe.
“I’m suing you!”
“What for?”
“It’s a surprise 🎉🥳🎊”
Well, they waited for Pocketpair to become big enough to give them money, and not too big to risk losing against them.
Please hurt them.
Nintendo is straight up evil.
Eat shit, Nintendo. I hope you lose and experience the Streisand effect.
Nintendo will be fine. lol
Oh shit here we go again with your rectangle looks too much like my rectangle.
Oh no, they actually made a good rectangle, our rectangle is cheap and boring. Instead of making an effort, we sue their rectangle
Patenting things like this that are obviously unpatentable ideas rather than actual inventions is unfortunately a necessity for defensive purposes in a world where companies will do anything in order to kill competition except risk competing with them since that isn’t guaranteed by throwing money at it. Enforcing a bunch of patents against a company with fewer liquid assets is a guaranteed way to beat a competitor with money alone since winning the suit isn’t the goal, only draining the assets of the competitor. Sucks that this is considered a valid business practice now.
