The last 10 days have brought a string of patent wins for Nintendo. Yesterday, the company was granted US patent 12,409,387, a patent covering riding and flying systems similar to those Nintendo has been criticized for claiming in its Palworld lawsuit (via Gamesfray). Last week, however, Nintendo received a more troubling weapon in its legal arsenal: US patent 12,403,397, a patent on summoning and battling characters that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted with alarmingly little resistance.
According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn't just a moment of questionable legal theory. It's an indictment of American patent law.
"Broadly, I don't disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents," said Sigmon, whose opinions do not represent those of his firm and clients. "They have been an embarrassing failure of the US patent system."
(Image credit: Nintendo, USPTO)
Sigmon, who we spoke with last year about the claims and potential consequences of Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit, said both this week's '387 patent and last week's '397 represent procedural irregularities in the decisionmaking of US patent officials. And thanks to those irregularities, Nintendo has yet more tools to bully its competitors.
The '387 patent granted this week, Sigmon told PC Gamer, "got a bit of push-back, but barely." After its initial application was deemed invalid due to similarities to existing Tencent and Xbox-related patents, Nintendo amended its claims based on interviews with the USPTO, which then determined that the claims were allowable "for substantially the same reasons as parent application(s)."
"That parent case," Sigmon said, "had an even weirder and much less useful prosecution history."
(Image credit: Nintendo, USPTO)
Most of the claims made in the '387 patent's single parent case, US Pat. No. 12,246,255, were immediately allowed by the USPTO, which Sigmon said is "a very unusual result: most claims are rejected at least once." When the claims were ultimately allowed, the only reasoning the USPTO offered was a block quote of text from the claims themselves.
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