this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Not that this would save the average person from litigation hell, but does Nintendo actually have a legal leg to stand on? What would make a (free) mod any different from any other artistic expression?
Also assuming the mod creator didn't do anything crazy like rip assets from an existing Pokémon game.
It wasn't free is the problem. They were selling it on patreon from what I have heard.
In many countries, the question of profit doesn't matter as to whether it violates copyright or not. Who knows where the legal stuff would happen but I looked up Australia's copyright laws as well as I could and it seems similar to US copyright with the fact that it doesn't matter whether someone is profiting from it or not.
Ah, thank you for that context, I didn't see any mention of Patreon in the article.
If they simply exported models from a Pokemon game and ported them to Palworld: That's a straight up, cut and dry copyright violation.
If he made them entirely by hand and just are the artist's own rendition of a real Pokemon... I'm not sure. Fanart is usually considered fair use, and it generally seems like that's how most mods are treated... But there is a chance that even a free, handmade Pokemon fan mod could damage sales of the actual Pokemon games if people think Palworld is a better Pokemon game than Pokemon. Based on that, they very well could have a case against it.
They own all of the Pokemon characters. Any art using Pokemon characters is copyright infringement. Non-profit fan art using those characters is almost never fair use; it's just not worth addressing until it's more significant than a fan drawing Pikachu.
They probably would have sent the takedown regardless, but putting it behind a paywall was a huge red flag begging to be shut down even faster.