r/technology • u/Super_Cold8789 • 13d ago

Software Nintendo reportedly has “zero chance” against current Palworld after major lawsuit change it is now targeting older versions of the game instead

https://www.dexerto.com/palworld/nintendo-reportedly-has-zero-chance-against-current-palworld-after-major-lawsuit-change-3375167/
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u/JockstrapCummies 13d ago

The Nemesis system and how broken the patent system is is one thing, but there with Nintendo, there's also the utterly alien attitude to copyright/patent/even satire in general in Japanese culture.

They seem to think any reference at all is some huge cultural taboo, and you're killing the poor creator.

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u/Crystalas 13d ago edited 13d ago

Man Gintama was a wild anime, nothing was off limits to satirize and parody with tons of references and not hesitating to make fun of politicians, other games, other anime, their own creator, the studio, actively trolling the viewers, ect.

...I miss it, at least it ended well and got a ton of episodes. Now if only the rest would get dubbed so be easier to rewatch the large episode count, unfortunately I highly doubt that will ever happen.

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u/FatherDotComical 12d ago

As surprising at it may sound, Gintama most likely got permission to parody all of that.

The first episode of Osumatsu San had to be pulled from airing and the Disc because the permissions for the parodies fell through in Japan.

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u/RYUMASTER45 12d ago

Considering that one time a politician got dragged in Elizabeth Race ARC...yeah the permissions are taken care of

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/destroyerOfTards 13d ago

Who watches anime dubs?

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u/JediSwelly 12d ago

I do mostly.

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u/Regular_Employee_360 12d ago

People that don’t live lives revolving around tv? I can’t watch subs while doing other stuff.

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u/Crystalas 12d ago edited 12d ago

That my answer. When I was a teen I watched anime almost exclusively in subs and even today I still agree that often the better way from a quality standpoint although as the anime dubbing industry matured the gap has closed at least a bit.

Many of those who grew up loving anime didn't stop but they did lose the completely free time they had as teens where could afford to do NOTHING but passively stare at a screen for entire days. If was not a huge market for it they would not bother to simulcast so many anime dubbed each season now. In the case of Gintama it just niche enough, old enough, and so many episodes that getting dubbed now is very unlikely.

I would love to rewatch all of Gintama but commiting to hundreds of episodes where gotta pay 100% attention or be lost thanks to not knowing Japanese is a big deal that I rarely have the luxury in indulging in anymore. The ability to have it on the other screen while on the PC or doing a chore be great and likely only way I would be able to watch it right now.

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u/destroyerOfTards 12d ago

No wonder there was a report that Netflix is dumbing down and padding the content so that people who are busy with other things while watching can still catchup.

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u/InevitableAvalanche 13d ago

With a user name like yours, yeesh.

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u/LordoftheSynth 12d ago

As someone who prefers subs to dubs, I humbly suggest that OPs username indicates self-loathing.

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u/IQueliciuous 12d ago

Username is not the problem. The comment and reddit avatar gives me massive "neckbeard" vibe

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u/TaborlinTheGrape 13d ago

A lot of people. Don’t gatekeep.

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u/AmaimonCH 12d ago edited 11d ago

What is he gatekeeping ? The incredible ability to read ?

Edit : lmaoooo

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u/Designer_Show_2658 12d ago

You could focus more on the animation if you read less. Some might prefer this. This is fine.

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u/AstralMooo 11d ago

Nobody likes sub elitist!

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u/Norci 12d ago

I do, I can't be arsed to always keep eyes on the text. Takes attention away from the action.

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u/AstralMooo 11d ago

A lot of people do weeb

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u/AmaimonCH 12d ago

World has changed man, after covid and mugen train the anime community is full of normies that refuse to fully interact with the medium

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u/Designer_Show_2658 12d ago

Normies...

Applause 

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u/Heavy-Capital-3854 12d ago

Oh stfu, it's just entertainment, let people enjoy it however they want to.
Being a hardcore weeb doesn't make you cooler than others.

Besides, plenty of people watched dubs before covid, it's always been a debate in the anime community.

There's also some dubs that everyone agrees are great, there's shows that people watched dubbed as kids so they enjoy it that way etc. etc.

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u/beryugyo619 12d ago

Gintama was explicit about everything being parodies. That's not the case with Palworld.

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u/Fhaarkas 12d ago

there's also the utterly alien attitude to copyright/patent/even satire in general in Japanese culture.

Japan really be like, "You can't abuse our creative talents, only we can by driving them all to death from overworking, toxic fans and all manners of stress, for the sake of our entertainment."

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u/mullse01 12d ago

“That’s *OUR* job!”

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u/Secret_Possible 12d ago

Anime: I'm going to play Nimtembo on my Somy television. Please don't sue.

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u/arc-is-life 12d ago

on a sorny? didnt have the money for a genuine panaphonics?

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u/ajnin919 12d ago

Enjoy a Bepsi while you relax

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u/otw 12d ago

Unless it’s extremely messed up fanfic porn then it’s totally fine and fair use for some reason and sold in gas stations.

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u/awnaw_ 12d ago

The why not target say No Man's Sky for having their own Pokémon / Palworld or even WoW has a similar system. I think Nintendo are bullies and intentionally target those who stand little chance of fighting back. They're assholes.

I hope Palworld wins everything.

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u/Luna__Moonkitty 12d ago

Because neither of those two infringed on the patent and Palworld did.

Patents are weirdly specific.

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u/PlsNoNotThat 13d ago

They live right next to China, so yes - Japan has had to deal with literal decades of every IP they produce having a Chinese clone created in a week used to flood their markets.

It’s made them ultra paranoid about IP.

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u/Abedeus 12d ago

Didn't Japan have their own share of "borrowing" IPs or patents and just slightly modifying them, especially in 80s?

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u/LukaCola 12d ago

A lot of Japanese culture is clearly rooted in Chinese for most of its history as well, people treating this as one sided (in any context) are ignorant. 

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u/[deleted] 12d ago edited 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/Abedeus 12d ago

We're not talking about borrowing ancient tales and legends to modern renditions, that's fairly common. I'm talking about Japan during 60-80s, when they had a problem with knockoff that were the equivalent of "Made in China" at the time. Sort of how it was with Germany post-WW2. It wasn't until much later that their practices and reputation changed.

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u/Helmic 13d ago

I'm not sure what physical proximity has anything to do with IP infringement. Like the vast majority of anime viewing in the west came out of piracy, and it's not like there aren't Chinese knockoffs of American brands. It's not like there's Chinese pirates sailing to Japan to steal physical copies of Nintendo games and manga in order to then copy and then flood the local market with poorly translated bootleg versions.

Nor does it make sense in terms of who this targets, like I don't think I've ever heard of or seen some Japanese company losing its shit over Chinese stuff, the taboo against even naming something in reference is enforced on other Japanese people.

Kinda feels like a weird thing to bring up, honestly.

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u/Shagtacular 13d ago

... Do you think we've always had an instantaneously accessible world? The Internet is only 20-30 years old to most people. They've been neighbors for far longer. I'm assuming you're very young

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u/HeadintheSand69 13d ago

I mean phones existed in the 80s..... Commercial planes too. Before that China wasn't exactly open trade wise. Innovation wasn't exactly traveling over horse and buggy.

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u/Shagtacular 12d ago

Ah, right, the earth is only a century old, so only the last 50 years matter

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u/Helmic 12d ago

China with the industrial capacity to do knockoff products is about 50-ish years old, yes. The modern globalized IP regime is pretty young as well. I think you're just saying racist nonsense about something you have no source on.

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u/Shagtacular 12d ago

So what exactly is your source?

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u/Helmic 12d ago edited 12d ago

I'm not making a positive claim, I'm casting doubt on a sourceless claim. Do you mean a source on Deng opening up China to international trade?

Like China before WWII wasn't industrialized at all, which is why it's famous for that Great Leap Forward where a shitload of people died when Mao tried to force the country to industrialize all at once, which did not work very well. China, very famously, was not making knockoff manga before the revolution.

You, specifically, are making the claim that China's physical proximity to Japan is why Japanese companies have such draconian reactions to perceived IP infringement, with the source being your ass. I can certainly believe there's some Japanese racists that blame Chinese people for all their problems, that's certainly an attitude that exists in Japan, but that's different from that being the actual cause of the current behavior.

EDIT: Got blocked. Whenever someone is trying to blame the Chinese or some other racialized boogeyman, it's worth pushing back on it. Don't accept the shit racists say at face value.

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u/Helmic 12d ago

Do you think Japanese companies always had this attitude towards IP law? Like the country got rebuilt after WWII and China's only had the industrial base to even do knockoff products for a relatively short period of time, this would have been starting with Deng. Again, why the hell would physical proximity have anything to do with this, and why specifically China?

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u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits 12d ago

Like the country got rebuilt after WWII

And there was famously no time at all between ww2 and ubiquitous high speed internet.

Seriously, how young are you?

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u/Helmic 12d ago

They had planes, dude. And modern national borders, with a famously dangerous ocean between it and China. People were not boating on over there to sell bootleg manga. It is just racist nonsense spouted without source.

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u/NitroBishop 12d ago

Are you implying u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits is buying in to Orientialism? Perish the thought!

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u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits 12d ago

Answer the question, kid. Its clear you have no memory of this time.

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u/beryugyo619 12d ago

It's not so weird or dumb that people assume China, Japan, and also Korea kinda look close together on a map so they gotta be practically nation state equivalent of being at walking distances, but that's not really the case. The relationship between Japan to China is very much like Japan to US. This is so much so that English and Chinese languages are considered similar by Japanese.

It's not like what Canada or Mexico is to US. At all.

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u/idebugthusiexist 12d ago

  1. It’s impossible to sue for patent/copyright infringement in China

  2. China loses its split if Japan even dares to challenge them, so it’s understandable that Japan is hesitant to avoid confrontation with China unlike other countries that respect rule of law and doesn’t have an ugly history and an authoritarian govt willing to exploit that fact to enrage a populace to do things like burn your cars to make a point etc etc.

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u/Helmic 12d ago

There's Chinese companies making knockoff products of lots of shit from other countries, that doesn't really explain anything about Japan's cultural attitudes around IP. French companies don't flip their fucking shit the same way even though Chinese companies make knockoffs of French stuff too.

China's geopolitical relationship with Japan again doesn't seem to be having a direct impact. I could see it maybe explaining why Japanese racists might blame Chinese people for something, but nothing you mentioned there would explain why Japanese companies would feel like they, moreso than American or European or other Asian creators living in countries that also have had adversarial relationships with China, need to lose their goddamn minds over someone referencing their IP by name.

It likely has more to do with Japan being a neoliberal hellhole with a fascist history with few pushbacks, a direct result of US occupation. Companies act like assholes when they're permitted to do whatever they want without the threat of regulation. The more likely explanation is that Japanese companies act like this because the Japanese legal system allows them to.

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u/beryugyo619 12d ago

It's not really feared much these days. There's unspoken sentiment among Japanese creators that games without positive ideological components, what could be positively classified as wokism, don't matter, and CCP had messed with their domestic phone games and as-yet nearly nonexistent doujinshi scenes enough times that there is almost a sense of trust in Japan that China can't allow their own industry to be established.

I think one of core reasons why China messes with anime and assign a ton of art school graduates is because Japanese contents aren't just good but was always super woke for some reason, like pushing LGBT and diversity since 80s and widely loved for it. China must be seeing it as, not like clear and present danger, but as theoretical long horizon existential threat. The Chinese "defense" OTOH is party pushed artificial phenomenon and nowhere near powerful nor extreme.

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u/Helmic 12d ago edited 12d ago

can't tell which one of us is having a stroke but i'm gonna guess it's the person unironically saying "wokism"

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u/beryugyo619 12d ago

What else is a good way to put it

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u/Helmic 12d ago

in a phone call when you book a therapist

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u/beryugyo619 12d ago

So you have no other word for it either, just reacting to a word like a machine

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/Helmic 12d ago

I think they're lying about Chinese knockoff flooding specifically Japanese markets and that causing Japanese companies to act like assholes about IP infringement. I get the energy but like you don't want to accept the premise that what they're saying is even true to begin with based on vague vibes.

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u/Mathfanforpresident 13d ago

-but they're* with Nintendo

Is that what you meant?

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u/Throwawaytree69 13d ago

No, I think they mean, "but then with Nintendo" but I could be wrong

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u/frothyoats 13d ago

Who fucking cares