Sounds to me like Palworld is safe if they're going after a mod for it
But that's not what's going on here? Nintendo is suing a mod creator who modded their actual IP into the game, and furthermore locked that mod through a paywall (Patreon), so, you know, profiting off of unlicensed distribution of another's intellectual property
Regarding genre, yeah, nintendo has no leg to stand on, and they know it anyway. You can't claim ownership of art styles or game mechanics, but that's neither the article nor the situation
They don't even have a legal case to go against Palworld anyway, unless the conspiracy-brains at Twitter are somehow correct about the devs ripping Pokemon models.
Palworld developer Pocketpair has insisted Palworld is more akin to survival crafting games such as Ark Survival Evolved and Valheim than Pokemon, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to hit out at the game.
And even if Palworld was a monster-taming-battling game, so what? There's Digimon, Temtem, Monster Hunter Stories, Medabots, and so on and so on, and many have existed for decades. No company can own the IP to a genre. Ultimately, the people claiming that Nintendo/Game Freak will do this or that are a tiny minority, but journalists and youtubers thirsty for clicks are giving them a megaphone.
How can you possibly be so confident they didn't pull models from Pokemon? It's absolutely a possibility, and frankly seems impossible not to be true when you directly compare the models.
Because it is obviously not true if you compare the models, if you have literally any experience of any kind with 3D models
Palworld has been in development for years which Nintendo was aware of, and could have done something about, the whole time. Both Nintendo and the company that develops and released Palworld are headquartered in Japan which doesn't really have a concept of fair use so it wouldn't exactly be a hard case for them if Palworld did infringe their IP. The mod OTOH was out for one day and Nintendo hit them with a cease and desist notice because it very clearly did infringe their IP and the mod was locked behind a paywall which makes it all the more egregious and therefore easy to get it taken down. Nintendo has a well deserved reputation as being sue happy when it comes to their IP being used in a way they don't approve of. If Nintendo thought for even a milisecond that Palworld infringed their copyrights, theyd have taken them to court a very long time ago. But the internet, being full of armchair legal experts, thinks they know copyright law better than Nintendo's cadre of lawyers. Its one of the most clear cut cases of the dunning krueger effect in a while.
Read the article? Lemmy? Hah
That's entirely missing the only reason Nintendo would actually pursue legal action. Many Palworld creatures appear to have literally identical base model proportions to Pokemon models. So exactly identical it's hard to believe it could happen once by chance, much less with over a dozen different creatures. It very strongly appears they took and modified straight Pokemon models, or at best used them as a direct reference.
Perhaps in a bid to avoid any potential issues with Nintendo, mod site Nexus Mods appears to be removing any Pokémon-related mods for Palworld from its site.
Nexus Mods out here making every decision possible to make me avoid them even more every year.
Oh no!
Anyway, Nexus Mods would have been sued into oblivion and what was left of it was a burning garbage pit if you had your way. It's a good thing you don't have decision making power there.
Aren't free mods under fair use? There's plenty of copyrighted material on nexusmods and even steam workshop, always has been and I hope always will be. The only issue with palworld pokemon mod was it's monetization afaik.
Fair use doesn't work that way. The mod may be defensible if it targets the copyrighted material with implicit or explicit commentary, doesn't usurp the original market, and only takes what is necessary for that commentary. But even then, it is a legal defense and doesn't prevent a lawsuit. And further, it is based on US law and Nintendo is a Japanese company that may assert its own laws in Japanese courts.
Whether or not it's free has next to no bearing, unfortunately.
You're not wrong, but being free does make a pretty massive difference in this context. After all, there are literally hundreds of pokemon mods for other games, and hundreds more fan games and romhacks. Some of them are huge, like Pokemon Infinite Fusion has a discord with over 400,000 people. The only time Nintendo decides to come after those projects is when they start trying to make money.
I dunno if that's true but if it is, can you then explain why are nexusmods and steam hosting tons of marvel/disney content without any repercussions for example? What's the difference between that and the pokemon mod, if not the asking price?
Japan doesnt really have a concept of fair use. Nintendo can and does go after a wide variety of things that might have been considered fair use elsewhere.
What this mod did would not be considered fair use anywhere else either.
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Never in all of human history has there been a more appropriate time for the Surprised Pikachu Face meme.
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