Owning Game Mechanics? Making Sense of Nintendo's Patents - Kirk Sigmon | grokludo 10

Kirk Sigmon is an attorney at Banner Witcoff , and an expert in patent law.

He joins us this week to make sense of the wild, and complicated situation in which Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are posturing towards US litigation against Pocketpair, the maker of Palworld. Litigation in Japan is already underway.

In the process, Nintendo has secured patents for game mechanics that look a lot like what we've already been playing for the last 30+ years.

There's patent activity relating to mounts and the quick-switching of mounts. There are patents about throwing an object to capture a character. And very recently, a new patent was secured that covers the summoning of a character.

This is a complicated and niche field, so we first cover some basics of patent law, before getting into the dirty details of what's been called "by far the most aggressive patent enforcement any game maker ever attempted against a rival."

00:00 - Intro
01:42 - What good patent law looks like in games
05:58 - How often do mechanics get patented?
07:50 - Nintendo pursuing patents after Palworld's release
14:00 - Reading patent claims is torture
16:34 - Nintendo curving patents towards litigation
23:22 - Patenting a summoning mechanic
26:35 - Limited resources at the patent office
30:53 - Where has patent law done well, and where poorly?
33:30 - The Inter Partes Review system
37:24 - Why not pursue litigation on the art style instead?
41:48 - Attack on the mod space as "prior art"

Sigmon points to several causes for the current situation, including limited resources at the USPTO, recent court decisions that point towards increasing grants, wanting to be more on-par with foreign patent offices, and a hindered Inter Partes Review system with little transparency.

Without much time to look at a patent application, an examiner might only be able to do a cursory search, without the background knowledge that lifelong gamers would have on the hobby. Such examiners might decide to grant the patent, effectively passing the problem to the courts, should the patent's validity ever be challenged.

But whatever the causes, as Sigmon says, once a patent is granted it creates an effective deterrent. Challenging it in the courts will cost millions of dollars, and for many, the path of least resistance is steering clear of infringement.

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