this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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My lay understanding was that patents were invalidated if prior art could be found before the application date?
If that was true then no patent Nintendo applied for after palwold demonstrated its use of a technique would hold water. This demonstration would be easy to verify as occurring at the time of release of preview videos, the games release, content patches, etc
So I must be wrong if they think JP7545191B1 might be the one.
That's probably true in normal countries. Japanese patent office is... Less than normal if these things can happen.
I've heard this a few times, but what does it ultimately mean? Doesn't it mean that, if they desired, they could still operate and just not sell in Japan? Granted, obviously, if the dev is Japanese (I have no idea in this case and don't feel like looking) then they'd have some issues, but for a western developer, it'd still be bad, losing all Japanese sales, but overall manageable.
I'm not a lawyer, so my knowledge is limited, but from what I understand, you can only make a claim for a patent infringement in the country where the company responsible for the infringement is located.
So they have this patent in Japan, but if I make a Pokémon-like game but I'm from, say, France, where this patent doesn't exist, Nintendo can only suck it up and cope, because they don't have a patent for this in France.
Isn't this the scenario the Patent Cooperation Treaty was intended to resolve?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Cooperation_Treaty
I'm not a lawyer but, I know when you file for a patent you can do that in just one country or internationally (which is significantly more expensive). Skimming through the Wikipedia article it seems to be talking about that, but first you need to have filed for the patent internationally and not in just one country.
From what I've read about this topic, it sounds like this is a patent active in Japan only.
Oh! So that treaty somewhat standardizes PA patent rights across participating nations and allows a the patent office to act as a agent in procuring international patents but doesn't actually offers a "globally" recognized patent in the way that the Berne Convention does for copyright.
So it looks like the infamous loading screen minigame patent was only registered in Japan and the USA. If I have this right it would not have been a barrier to implementing a loading screen minigame anywhere else (e.g. PAL regions in their entirety)?
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632