this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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I'd argue against the example image being damning in the first place because it's fairly obvious they're both derived from the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, which is well passed the point of being public domain
Not only that but they have entirely different body shapes and color schemes. I doubt a face by itself could be copyrighted. If that was the case a lot of anime would have issues.
The thing is they literally took pokemon 3D assets, edited them a little and that's all
Because pals look like this
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TOedaV033DY/maxresdefault.jpg
but now IN 3D!!!
Pals
https://imgur.com/PbtJxRr
They took Serperior head+ Milotic body and Primarina hair
https://nintenduo.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Palworld-Plagio-Pokemon-03-1024x576.webp
self-explanatory
For the thumbnail image, they took meoth face, purugly body and that's it
These designs are not "inspired" they simply imported the assets from a pokemon game on blender or something, used "copy and paste" for different body parts and that's it, job done that's their completely original creature, totally not copied
The person in social media who extracted and compared assets admitted they modified them to appear more similar because they didn't like how the game promotes animal cruelty.
One thing that a lot of people don't seem to realize in this whole discussion is that, whatever you may think of it as far as artistic integrity goes, Pokémon only owns the full complete design of their characters and the actual game files, but not every possible independently produced variation or recombination of those traits. They own Wooloo but they don't own every possible roundish sheep-like creature.
To be fair it's obvious that Palworld's company Pocket Pair doesn't care about originality. But whether the are literally infringing on the Pokémon property is unclear, and a lot of people are making serious but baseless accusations out of snowballing social media outrage.
If there's any actual, real issue that warrants a lawsuit, you can be sure that the Pokémon Company's lawyers will find it out. It's not like they need anyone to defend them, we are literally talking about the biggest media brand in the world.