this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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The lack of a lawsuit over this game has shaken the foundations of my whole concept of how the world works
Devs copying popular games has been a thing since almost as long as they've been around. Street Fighter spawned a dozen clones that asked themselves "What if we had a Chun Li and Ryu, but changed the color of their clothes and maybe gave them a hat." Street Fighter straight ripped character designs from the Riki-Oh manga.
There's also movies like Space Balls that are Star Wars but funny.
And Data East was sued for Fighter's History, which was honestly total bullshit and Capcom ended up losing anyway.
Street Fighter was the example I thought of, honestly, with the Fighter's History suit that BelieveRevolt mentioned. There were a ton of SF2 copycats, but Fighter's History was the one that finally crossed the line in Capcom's eyes. And Nintendo is just generally more litigious than Capcom was
Space Balls is a parody, so it’s protected by different rules than something like a Streetfighter Clone, which is just a derivative mimicry
Lucas films was ready to sue over it and only relented because Mel Brooks signed an agreement saying he wouldn't do any merchandising.
Copyright is a lot more specific than that. It's really just place names, character names, item names, specific designs of characters, etc.
None of the individual things in Palworld are taken from Pokemon, just the general concept and if you could copyright "capture cartoony monsters and do cockfighting" then you could copyright "side scrolling aircraft shoots other aircraft"
Sorta off topic, but did you know it's not even legal to copyright a cooking recipe?
I was thinking of character designs only. Even there, I don't think Nintendo/TPC would win a case; I'm just very used to seeing larger companies lean on smaller ones through litigation, so it's surprising not to see it here
I'm glad that game concepts in general aren't copyrightable, and I hate it when companies get patents for particular systems (looking at you, Namco loading screen games and WB Nemesis system)
Yeah that shit needs to stop, tech patent trolling is absolutely nutty. They could end it any fucking time but won't.
Long ago some people patent trolled the concept of downloading music faster than the runtime of the music, which is literally just patenting the concept of a good modem
I scrolled through a list of them and saw none that looked like pokemon except, again, in more than a "vague cartoony monster" way
That argument never held any water for me. It's like saying Counterstrike should sue Modern Warfare because both are about the shoot bang.
I reckon its a pretty generic monster capturing game, don't we already have this kind of stuff? Even the anime has a bunch of copycats, and some people even like the copy better.