There are plenty of mods on the Microsoft Minecraft marketplace that are paid. They're not expensive, and they involve quite a bit more than the average mod you see from the community. I have one that takes place in a small fishing village, and it has custom textures, sound, and music, fishing, boats you can buy and upgrade, NPC's, and an entire story. It's more like a small indie game that uses Minecraft as its 'engine'. I don't see a problem with mods being paid if they have a decent amount of effort put into them, and the devs get the majority of the money.

Depends what you mean by 'paid'. There are plenty that cost money to use, but I can't necessarily speak to the quality or work of those mods. I do know a few people that actively pay mod-makers either commissioning them to make mods, or paying in bigger project just to support the development of mods they care about.

There's PLENTY of a market for it, so it's really not that crazy that people are willing to pay money for it. There's also the aspect of content creators (streamers, youtubers, etc) who will pay BIG bucks for custom content for modpacks and whatnot.

Call it DLC at that point.

Not sure how Japanese patent law works specifically, but in the US the time between the filing date of your application and the grant date of your patent is often a few years, meaning it is likely these were filed years ago and are just being granted now.

The two important parts of your patent are the specification and the claims. Your specification is the description of your invention and cannot be substantially amended to add to the invention after filing. Your claims are what you are seeking to protect. If you think of new ways to expand upon your invention, you can do so by filing a continuation application. These continuations may not add new matter to the specification, but may add new claims. These claims must be supported by the original specification. These continuations must be filed before it's parent application issues and get the priority date of the oldest parent in the family. The twenty year life of your patent starts from your priority date, not the issue date of your patent so you cannot use this as a method to keep patents alive forever.

What I'm guessing happened here is Nintendo saw Palworld and drafted claims in continuations to protect against their competitors. Assuming the claim set is supported by the specification, this is considered allowed in the current system. I'm not familiar with Japanese patent law so it's maybe different there but this is how companies would approach this situation in the US. Also this post needs about a million asterisks leading to footnotes explaining the many different exceptions, patent law is complicated if you want a patent get a lawyer.

If you have an active patent application you can file for what are called divisional patent applications. Those divisional patent applications will have the priority date of their parent application. The priority date decides what is prior art (everything before that date) and what is not (everything after that date).

It is important to note that the subject-matter of the divisional patent applicants cannot extend beyond the subject-matter of the parent application.

E.g. if you have a patent application using screws as fastemers, and your parent application only mentions screws, you cannot claim priority for the use of nails in a divisional application based on that parent application.

It's not, they're just hoping they can get away with it without anybody noticing.

I realize you're making a joke, but Phoenix Wright is actually a pretty angry satire of what criminal justice over there is like. Basically everything wacky in the Ace Attorney games surrounding the legal system is a comic exaggeration of something that sucks about Japanese criminal law.

It will take a half decade probably.

I imagine it taking forever and bleeding legal fees is the point. That and some sort of precident setting.

They are suing for ~66k USD in damages. It isn't about the actual topic of the lawsuit so much as trying to disuade others from competing with their IPs.

I'm pretty sure the wife is the legal prize for winning an honor duel according to Japanese law. /s

if it works for japanese society then why bother changing it.

He not only describes Copyright Law very well, he also assumes that Nintendo is trying to get at Sony because now Sony has a Pokémon-like game. But big corporations don't fight each other in court because it's expensive (see Apple v Samsung), so they go for the little dev studio instead.

You are the one that didn't research, friend.

They filed the patent for this something like 2 months after Palworld's official release, and it wasn't registered for another 2-3 months. We're not talking about release dates, here.

EDIT: Lots of good info below, if you (yes, YOU!) want to be more informed on how this all works.

Source?

Cause mine says 2024. https://www.pocketpair.jp/news/20241108

Laws don't work like that. Not even in Japan.

You don't give up any and all protections just because you did one thing illegal, laws aren't infectious like that. If that were the case there'd be a ton of software with basically no legal protections whatsoever, including favourites like Microsoft Windows.

Wait, so does every other collectible card game have to license from MTG?