Judge In Absolute Bullshit Copyright Case Against Mariah Carey Signals She’s Leaning Carey’s Way

Copyright

from the just-in-time-for-xmas dept

As the saying goes, the arc of morale judgment is long, but it does bend towards justice. And even if we accept such an optimistic worldview is relevant in this year of our lord, 2024, that certainly doesn’t mean we can’t bitch about how long that damned arc is. It’s been over two years since Mariah Carey was sued for copyright infringement by Andy Stone, accusing her of infringing upon his own song All I Want For Christmas Is You. As Mike laid out in great detail in that original post, the entire lawsuit is a complete mess. The copying that Stone alleges amounts to two things: the title of the song and its theme. Neither of those are protected elements as far as copyright law is concerned. But that wasn’t the only issue.

Other problems for the suit are legion. Stone’s accusation against Carey would apply to his own song as well, given how it has the same similarities he’s suing over as a Carla Thomas song from 1963 titled, you guessed it, All I Want For Christmas Is You. The suit was filed in Louisiana for… reasons? None of that is laid out in the complaint and none of the parties reside there. The filing itself referenced exhibits that Stone’s lawyers appear to have forgotten to include in the complaint initially. And all of that is under the umbrella of this suit having been filed decades after Carey’s song was released. For tens of years this wasn’t a problem, but now Stone would please like $20 million.

He’s not going to get it. Mike said as much in that first post, but now the judge in the case is considering motions for summary judgment and is signaling where she’s leaning on the matter.

A federal judge on Thursday said she will likely dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed by Vince Vance, of the country music novelty act Vince Vance & the Valiants, against pop icon Mariah Carey over the perennial hit “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”

U.S. District Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani said that she didn’t think Vance had shown that the two songs had similarities that were protected by copyright law.

So this thing is almost certainly dead in the water. I have yet to see a judge put out these warning signals in cases like these only to reverse them later. And, for their part, Carey’s lawyers have already filed for sanctions against Stone’s lawyers for some of their behavior, such as filing a motion for summary judgment that is “legally frivolous” and for trying to use expert testimony at this early a stage.

Which leads to the obvious question that we also had in our original post: will the ultimate outcome of this actually be Stone paying legal fees to Carey for all of this trouble? It’s sure hard to see how that won’t happen at this stage, with the entire output of Stone and his legal team being so downright silly.

So, while I hope Carey once again gets her “you” for Christmas this year, perhaps she’ll get a little monetary present under the tree as well.

Filed Under: all i want for christmas is you, andy stone, christmas songs, copyright, mariah carey, vince vance

Lies, Panic, And Politics: The Targeted Takedown Of Backpage

Legal Issues

from the weaponization-of-government dept

The case against Backpage was built on lies, innuendo, and a willful misunderstanding of how the internet works. But that didn’t stop the government from destroying the company and its founders’ lives.

Over the last few years, we’ve written about how the entire case against Backpage was a travesty of justice. The company actually worked closely with the feds (and even received commendations) to stop any actual human trafficking on their platform, but refused to help the feds go after consenting adult sex work. After that happened, a bunch of government actors turned on the company and falsely painted it as knowingly helping sex trafficking.

A number of different criminal and civil cases were brought against the company and its owners, one of whom, Jim Larkin, died by suicide last year. Over and over again, politicians and the media painted Backpage as being a truly evil player in the space. However, the more you looked at the details, the more it seemed like they were convenient political scapegoats in a war against a free internet.

So much of our own coverage was building on the incredible work of Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown. She recently completed a new 45-minute documentary about the railroading of Backpage and its founders, which you can watch on YouTube:

There’s also a big article that discusses much of what’s in the video as well (at the link above) which is also worth reading. Here’s just a snippet:

In 2004, Lacey and Larkin launched the website Backpage as an extension of the classified ads that had always run in the back of their newspapers (and most other newspapers). Backpage.com had all the sections you would find in its print counterparts, including apartments for rent, job openings, and personals and adult services ads, separated by city.

At first, nobody paid much attention to the site. When attorneys general declared war on adult services ads online in the late 2000s, the similar but better-known Craigslist was the platform in their crosshairs.

Though newspapers had for decades published ads for escorts, phone sex lines, and other forms of legal sex work, Craigslist’s online facilitation of these ads coincided with two burgeoning moral panics. The first concerned the rise of user-generated content—platforms such as Craigslist and early social media entities that allowed speech to be published without traditional gatekeepers.

The second panic: sex trafficking. A coalition of Christian activists and radical feminists had been teaming up to push the idea that levels of forced and underage prostitution were suddenly reaching epidemic proportions. To support this narrative, they tended to conflate all prostitution or even any sort of sex work with coerced sex trafficking.

I do appear a bit in the documentary, though most of it focuses (more importantly) on founder Michael Lacey and all he’s been through.

The whole video is worth watching. It shows how an entire government apparatus can be turned around to try to burn down a media operation based on misleading claims of “sex trafficking,” leaving people and a business completely ruined just on the bases of innuendo and rumors.

Learning from what happened to Backpage is that much more important, especially as we’re now entering a new era of attacks on free expression.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, free speech, jim larkin, michael lacey, online speech, overreaction, sex work
Companies: backpage, backpage.com

County Pays $300,000 To 11-Year-Old Whose Pet Goat Was Seized And Killed By Cops Because She Backed Out Of A 4-H Auction

Legal Issues

from the going-out-of-their-way-to-make-someone-miserable dept

Never underestimate the amount of effort law enforcement officers will expend to dispense as much cruelty as possible. And never forget these are the people we are expected to believe are actually there to protect and serve. While it’s great there’s a settlement payment on the way, the fact is that this extremely vindictive and extremely expensive act of uncalled-for “retribution” should never have happened in the first place.

Here’s the story: Jessica Long bought a goat as a pet for her daughter and raised it at their Shasta County, California home. Her daughter (referred to only as “E.L.” in this litigation) named it “Cedar” and cared for it daily. Long’s daughter was enrolled in the local 4-H program and decided to take her pet goat to be “exhibited” at the Shasta County Fair.

But it wasn’t an exhibition. It was a livestock auction. California state senator Brian Dahle — bidding through a proxy — won the auction for Cedar, paying $902 to take possession of the goat. E.L. didn’t want to give up her pet, perhaps misunderstanding what was actually going to happen when she walked it out for display on the auction floor. Her mother talked to fair officials, explaining her daughter’s refusal to part with her pet. She also offered to pay the auction fees for the sale that would no longer happen: $63.14, or 7% of the sales price.

The family never took possession of the state senator’s winning bid, so they weren’t trying to have their paycheck and their goat, too. When contacted about the girl’s reluctance to part with her goat, Brian Dahle assured the family he wouldn’t attempt to force the girl to give up her goat.

But the fair decided to get all shitty about it. It contacted the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, claiming property (that would be the goat) had been “stolen” from it. The Sheriff’s Office could have noted this complaint, typed up a report, and thrown in it with the untested rape kits for the rest of whatever. But it didn’t do this. Instead, it went into hot pursuit mode. The family had since taken the goat to an animal sanctuary in Napa County.

Rather than pass this info on to Napa County officials, the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office spent local money sending deputies on a 500-mile round trip to seize the “stolen” goat. By that point, the goat had already been re-homed and now resided at another farm in Sonoma County. Despite not having a warrant to search the Sonoma County farm, the deputies did so anyway. They located Cedar, seized the goat, turned it over to Shasta County fair officials (who, it should be noted, are not government officials) who immediately sent the goat out to be slaughtered.

If anything’s clear from this horrific chain of events, it’s that the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office has more money and officers than it needs. I can’t believe there’s a single person in Shasta County (not including any deputies who live there) who would be happy to know this is how their tax dollars are being spent. There’s not a person in that county (outside of fair officials) who actually think this is the sort of “crime” that’s worth 12 hours of labor (per deputy) and 500 miles of gas to handle.

There’s no bringing back Cedar. But at least E.L. and her family will get paid for this incredible waste of time and money by county law enforcement. And, hopefully, Shasta County residents will remember this as they open their pocketbooks to cover a settlement payment instigated by petty, vindictive fair officials and county law enforcement officers when the local sheriff goes up for re-election.

Shasta County and its sheriff’s office, along with a lieutenant and two detectives, agreed to settle the infamous viral case of Cedar the goat for $300,000.

Of that total amount, $100,000 is specifically earmarked in the settlement agreement. Attorneys will get $35,000 in fees, while the remaining $65,000 will go into a trust fund for the girl, now 11.

Other defendants, including fair employees and a 4-H volunteer, still remain in the suit.

TWO DETECTIVES! The sheriff’s office put two detectives on this case. Holy hell. I realize investigations aren’t zero sum, but how in all that is either holy or unholy (depending on your religious preferences) can you justify throwing three officers (two of which are detectives) at the nonexistent “theft” of a goat even the auction winner said he wasn’t willing to take possession of if the pet’s owner wasn’t willing to voluntarily part with it.

Then there’s the fair, which is its own pile of steaming horseshit. At best, the fair was only entitled to the $63.14 in commission from the sale. And the mother of the pet’s owner had already offered to cut them a check for that amount. But rather than defer to the pet owner and/or the winning bidder, it decided it needed to waste way more than $63.14 of its own time pressing theft charges. And even worse, it found a lieutenant and two detectives willing to turn the loss of $63.14 into a multi-county investigation.

These are all people who should not be in positions of power, no matter how limited. These are nasty, small people who weren’t satisfied until they’d driven halfway across the state to take a girl’s pet goat for the sole reason of slaughtering it. I cannot even fathom just how insanely vindictive you have to be to set these actions in motion, much less participate in them directly. It boggles the mind. And it absolutely boils the blood.

The settlement is great, but it hardly feels like justice. The only way to make people like this comprehend the consequences of their actions is to subject them to exactly the same sort of vindictiveness. E.L. and her mother should have been given permission to walk into the houses of the fair officials and involved officers and set fire to $300,000 of their prized personal belongings. I realize the law will never allow for that, but it somehow allows the government to do basically the same thing and to use other people’s money to buy their way out of personal accountability for their actions. No one will learn anything from this experience other than the victims of this abuse of government power.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, california, goat, jessica long, scso, shasta county, shasta county sheriff
Companies: 4-h

Daily Deal: Babbel Language Learning (All Languages)

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let’s focus on the app. Right off the bat, let’s be clear about one thing: When we say “app” we don’t mean that you’re limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won’t have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you’ll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14 languages. Want to try your hand at all of them? Knock yourself out — you’ll have a lifetime to get it done. And you can tackle one or all in 10-to-15-minute bite-sized lessons, so there’s no need to clear hours of your weekend to gain real-life conversation skills. It’s on sale for $149.97 for a limited time only.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Judge To Zuckerman: Release Your App First, Then We’ll Talk Section 230

Legal Issues

from the chilling-effects dept

The first shot to use Section 230 to force adversarial interoperability on platforms has hit a setback.

Earlier this year, we wrote about an absolutely fascinating lawsuit that was an attempt to activate a mostly-ignored part of Section 230 in a really interesting way. Most people know about Section 230 for its immunity protections for hosting and content moderation of third party content. But Section (c)(2)(B) almost never warrants a mention. It says this:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1)

This part of the law almost never comes up in litigation, but Ethan Zuckerman, who has spent years trying to inspire a better internet (partly as penance for creating the pop-up ad), along with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, tried to argue that this section means that a platform, like Meta, can’t threaten legal retaliation against developers who are offering third party “middleware” apps that work on top of a platform to offer solutions that “restrict access to material” on a platform.

The underlying issue in the lawsuit was that Ethan wanted to release a plugin called “Unfollow Everything 2.0” based on an earlier plugin called “Unfollow Everything,” which allowed Facebook users to, well, unfollow everything. This earlier plugin was created by developer Louis Barclay, after he found it useful personally to just unfollow everyone on his Facebook account (not unfriend them, just unfollow them). Meta banned Barclay for life from the site, and also threatened legal action against him.

In the last few years, it’s unfortunately become common for the big platforms to legally threaten any service that tries to build tools to work on top of the service without first getting permission or signing some sort of agreement to access an API.

These legal threats have wiped out the ability to build tools for other platforms without permission. They’ve also very much gotten in the way of important “adversarial interoperability” tools and services that history has shown have been vital to innovation and competition.

So the argument from Zuckerman is that this little snippet from Section 230 says that he can’t face legal liability for his tool. Meta could still take technical actions to try to break or block his app, but they couldn’t threaten him with legal actions.

Meta’s response to all of this was that the court should reject Zuckerman’s case because the specifics of the app matter, and until he’s released the app, there’s no way to actually review this issue.

The Court should decline Plaintiff’s request to invoke this Court’s limited jurisdiction to issue an advisory opinion about a non-existent tool. Plaintiff’s claims—which are contingent on facts that cannot be known until after he has created and released Unfollow Everything 2.0 and Meta has had an opportunity to evaluate how the tool actually works—are not ripe for review under either Article III of the Constitution or the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2201.

It appears that the judge in the case, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, found that argument persuasive. After a hearing in court last Thursday, the judge dismissed the case, saying that Zuckerman could conceivably refile once the app is released. While a written opinion is apparently coming soon, this is based on what happened in the courtroom:

Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted Meta’s request to dismiss the lawsuit on Thursday, according to court records. The judge said Mr. Zuckerman could refile the lawsuit at a later date.

This is perhaps not surprising, but it’s still not good. It’s pretty obvious what would happen if Zuckerman were to release his app because we already know what happened to Barclay, including the direct threats to sue him.

So, basically, the only way to move forward here is to put himself at great risk of facing a lawsuit from one of the largest companies in the world with a building full of lawyers. The chilling effects of this situation should be obvious.

I don’t know what happens next. I imagine Zuckerman can appeal to the Ninth Circuit, or he could actually try to release the app and see what happens.

But seeing as how the big platforms have spent over a decade abusing legal threats against companies that are just trying to help build products on top of those platforms, it would have been nice to have received a clean win that such “middleware” apps can’t be blocked through legal intimidation. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet.

Filed Under: adversarial interoperability, ethan zuckerman, interoperability, jacqueline scott corley, middleware, section 230
Companies: meta

Streaming Video Prices Rise While Quality Falls, Following Cable TV’s Lead

Culture

from the enshittify-everything dept

Streaming video still provides some meaningful advantages to traditional cable: it’s generally cheaper (assuming you don’t sign up for every service under the sun); customer satisfaction ratings are generally higher; and users have more power to pick and choose and cancel services at a whim.

But the party simply isn’t poised to last.

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, streaming giants have started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means steadily worse service at higher prices to appease Wall Street’s demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost (even long term company health).

As a result, Netflix has started acting like password sharing, something it advocated for for years, is a dire cardinal sin. Amazon now thinks would be fun to increase the number of ads it runs, charging Amazon Prime users even more money to avoid them. Consumers are paying more for streaming than ever as layoffs abound, streaming catalogs shrink, and the underlying product quality gets worse.

Ars Technica points to a recent flood of surveys from TiVO, CableTV.com, and Whip Media that all show that streaming customers continue to report a drop in the quality and customer satisfaction of streaming services over the last few years. When asked why this is happening, TiVo analysts suggest the problem is simply that companies are struggling to make streaming profitable:

“The amount of new original content overall on SVODs may be down [year over year] as many streamers continue to struggle to hit profitability targets. Without new original content (or exclusive content deals), perceptions of value/differentiation may decline.”

You’ll notice that neither the trend-studying organizations nor Ars discuss several important things. One, the pay for fail-upward media sector executives (like Time Warner CEO David Zaslav) continues to skyrocket despite both strategic missteps and quality problems. Two, that mindless consolidation and a “growth for growth’s sake” merger mania mindset is only accelerating all these problems.

Or three, that this is all driven by Wall Street’s insatiable need for improved short-term quarterly improvements at any cost, regardless if that ultimately harms consumers, workers, or the product itself. It’s simply not good enough to provide an affordable product people really like; the need for improved quarterly returns at impossible, permanent scale inevitably results in a sort of product cannibalization and destructive performance art (see: the AT&T Time Warner Discovery mergers) that’s not really subtle.

Companies can mitigate this erosion if they’re in sectors where there’s still subscriber growth to be had or if they’re able to expand into additional business opportunities. But streaming subscriber growth has hit a wall, and there’s nowhere else to really go if your product is quality film and television.

So instead we get more creative ways to be annoying and nickel-and-dime customers for ever-sagging product quality. This results in an enshittification cycle that absolutely will drive more users to either free services (Twitch, TikTok, YouTube) or piracy, at which point streaming executives will blame everything (younger generations! VPNs!) but their own choices.

It’s exactly what cable TV executives did. And many of those folks now work in streaming, having been financially incentivized every step of the way to have learned nothing from the experience.

Filed Under: competition, consumers, enshittification, prices, streaming, tv, video
Companies: disney, netflix, warner bros. discovery

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the let-the-discourse-flow dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Arianity with a comment about Bezos’s endorsement gambit backfiring:

Trump is a disgusting pile of trash, but it is really funny how he always turns on people who help him. People just lining up to get their faces eaten by leopards, after watching the previous guy get his face eaten, daily. It would be funnier if we weren’t stuck in the same boat with these idiots.

“Donald Trump won’t be satisfied until the Washington Post is full of pro-Trump propaganda and nonsense.”

And then he’ll still throw it under the bus the moment his whims feel like it.

In second place, it’s an anonymous reply to someone defending Trump’s lawsuit against CBS:

Alright. Let’s see every trump interview over his life released in full and uncensored.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment on our post about the need to fight for free speech in Trump’s America:

A quick reminder to conservatives reading this.

William Westmoreland lost his defamation case.

Richard Jewell lost his defamation case.

Nick Sandmann lost his defamation case.

Stop filing dumb lawsuits. You’re only embarrassing yourself.

Next, it’s an anonymous reply to the claim that things were great during Trump’s first term:

… Los Angeles suspending air quality standards so the crematoriums could burn the COVID dead quickly enough, federal law enforcement grabbing American citizens off the streets and into unmarked vans, unauthorized and secret medical procedures on prisoners. Just so much freedom and goodness.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is a frustrated anonymous response to a troll:

Try not to suck off any fascists on your way to the parking lot.

In second place, it’s That One Guy with another comment about Bezos’s backfire:

Who could have ever seen that coming?

Bezos: But I voiced my support for the Leopards Eating Peoples’ Faces party!

While convicted felon Trump’s attack on the press is disgusting and should be enough to prevent anyone who cares the slightest about the first amendment or free speech from supporting him I have to say there is more than a little schadenfreude to be found in watching the gutless coward Bezos attempt to appease said convicted felon only to immediately have his face on the menu like this.

“The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and all these papers. They’re not endorsing anybody. You know what they’re really saying – because they only endorse Democrats – they’re saying this Democrat’s no good. They’re no good. And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it,” he said.

And the cowardice of the american press comes home to roost. They sanewashed his words and actions, treated him as a reasonable person and candidate with positions that deserved to be respected, bent over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt and it got them… ‘Unless you explicitly support my opponent that means you support me and want to see me elected.’

I’d call it a risky gambit on his part as claiming a fraudulent endorsement already blew up in his face once before but this late in the game and given who he’s talking about? It’s probably a fairly safe lie as they’re not likely to do anything in response.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, pickings are a bit slim — I guess people weren’t in the funniest mood this week (for some reason), and there aren’t many comments with much in the way of funny votes. Still, a quick nod to this anonymous clapback to a trollish request for an explanation:

I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you.

And finally, Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the religious right’s opposition to adult content:

“You get to spend eternity with us!” is not the hard sell for Heaven that conservative Christian assholes think it is.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: November 3rd – 9th

Techdirt

from the as-you-were dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, we noted how the FCC’s freakout about Huawei was out of step with the way it ignored the internet of broken things. We were not shocked to learn ISPs were cutting back 2020 investment plans despite all the tax breaks and the death of net neutrality, and not thrilled that CBP was getting access to NSA and CIA data collections. The FBI’s top lawyer from the Apple encryption fight said it was time to suck it up and embrace encryption, while the government was threatening to kill free trade with South Africa because Hollywood complained about fair use. And Devin Nunes was still demanding silence from the satirical internet cow, while PragerU lost another silly lawsuit against YouTube.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, Congress was getting ready to push a dangerous cybersecurity bill, James Comey was demanding tech companies grant the FBI complete access to whatever it wants, and documents obtained by the ACLU showed how the NSA was unable to prevent collection of data on US citizens. Roca Labs was threatening sites for writing about its case and suing a witness who came forward in its lawsuit against PissedConsumer, while Lena Dunham was threatening a lawsuit over an interpretation of her book that she disliked, and pianist Dejan Lazic was doubling down on his abuse of the right to be forgotten. Meanwhile, a court told the US government it can’t just wave “state secrets” like a magic wand to make cases go away.

Fifteen Years Ago

Speaking of the magic wand of state secrets, this week in 2009 that’s exactly what the Obama administration was waving to try to block all cases about warrantless wiretapping. Meanwhile, new details on ACTA were continuing to show how it was an entertainment industry wishlist, the MPAA was saying the internet will die if it doesn’t get to police piracy, and the FCC was worryingly close to letting Hollywood break your TV and DVR (although the evidence showed DVRs were helping, not hurting, the industry). The Swedish Pirate Party won a second EU Parliament seat, and EU officials were slightly pushing back against Hollywood demands. Also, a sea change in the world of navigation kicked off as Google struck out on its own and made navigation tools free.

Filed Under: history, look back

Patents Nintendo Suing Palworld Over Confirmed, But, Damn, This Suit Is Weird

Patents

from the none-of-this-makes-sense dept

If you’ve followed along with our coverage on the hit video game Palworld, developed by Pocketpair, you will know that Nintendo and the Pokémon Co. has sued Pocketpair for patent infringement. Prior to the suit, there had been a ton of speculation that a lawsuit would be filed, but that it would be a copyright infringement suit. That was because there was a clear inspirational element in Palworld harkening back to Pokémon properties, though we also argued that no direct copying had occurred, only concepts and ideas repurposed. For that reason, I was excited that any copyright suit would serve as a demonstration of the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law. And I generally believed that such a suit would be filed, given the overtly litigious history of both Nintendo and The Pokémon Co.

Instead we got the patent infringement lawsuit. Speculation began immediately as to what patent or patents would be at the heart of that suit. Generally, said speculation landed on a parent and several divisional patents that involve throwing an object at an on-screen character or creature in a video game in order to capture it. That itself was somewhat perplexing, as games that are older than Pokémon have had similar mechanics to that in the past.

But now we have confirmation that that speculation was mostly correct.

“The Plaintiffs,” says Pocketpair, “claim that ‘Palworld,’ released by us on January 19, 2024, infringes upon the following three patents held by the Plaintiffs, and are seeking an injunction against the game and compensation for a portion of the damages incurred between the date of registration of the patents and the date of filing of this lawsuit.”

Looking up those patents, the first alludes to a system where a player aims and fires an “item” toward a character in a field, and in doing so triggers combat, and then dives into extraordinary intricacies about switching between modes within this. The second is very similar, but seems more directly focused on tweaking previous patents to including being able to capture Pokémon in the wild, rather than only during battle. The third, rather wildly, seems to be trying to claim a modification to the invention of riding creatures in an open world and being able to transition between them easily.

I’ll restate what I said in the previous post about these patents. These patents cover broad ideas. It’s a wonder to me why those patents were ever granted in the first place. The paperwork covering them, though rife with pretty diagrams and pictures, doesn’t exactly outline the sort of inventive content I was expecting. Instead, they appear to cover concepts of game mechanics, as though Nintendo or The Pokémon Co. could gobble up the right to use them in video games. The last of these patents in the quote above is perhaps the best example of this.

But it gets even starnger after that.

The statement also includes details on the damages Nintendo is seeking, for what it’s claiming is a violation of it intellectual property. The company wants 10 million yen to be equally split between Nintendo Co., Ltd., and The Pokémon Company. That works out to just under $33,000 each.

All of this for roughly $66,000? I’d have to think that any such award would be eaten into heavily by whatever time and monetary investment these two companies have made into this lawsuit. What can explain the desire by Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. to move forward with this suit when there is so little on the line?

The best I can come up with is that both of these companies just can’t help themselves when it comes to intellectual property. They seem to be more interested in getting their pound, or perhaps ounce, of flesh than making any sort of sound business decisions.

Filed Under: palworld, patents, pokemon
Companies: nintendo, pocketpair, pokemon company