Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
“Method for releasing 927 iterations of the same stale game across multiple platform generations.”
It can’t possibly be for “Method of splitting one complete game into two mutually exclusive cartridges with separate rosters to entice whales to buy two copies,” because if it were they’d have already sued Capcom 15 years ago.
Pokemon: The innovative RPG where you couldn’t even walk diagonally until generation 6…
It is not about model rips. Check your inbox to my other reply to another of your comments.
Aren’t they suing because of the 3d models??
No, they’re not. The word “patent” is used in every single article about this repeatedly. Patents are not the same as copyrights.
A copyright protects a creative work: A work of fiction, a movie, a character.
A patent protects the method in which the way a thing functions: A machine, a chip, an algorithm, or in Nintendo’s assertion certain vague gameplay concepts.
Yeah, you did not read any of the articles about this or understand the suit.
Nintendo is putting this forth as a patent issue, not a copyright issue. I presume this is because even they are smart enough to realize that they would probably lose a copyright challenge. However, the patents they are attempting to claim are clearly bullshit. They’re just doing this as a bludgeon to bully a company they don’t like, most likely in the hopes that the sheer cost of litigation will break them.
If they were going to propose that some of the monster models from Palworld originated as Pokemon model rips, they could arguably have a leg to stand on. But that’s not what they’re saying. The outcome of this case is not going to have any impact on copyright issues. Rather, the potential result is much more dangerous – it would confirm that a big company can just come in late and retroactively lay claim to large swathes of mechanical concepts that have already widely in use in a particular industry for decades.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
IDGAF about Palworld as a game, personally. I’ve never played it and I don’t plan to. But that doesn’t make Nintendo’s behavior not bullshit, and I still hope the Palworld developers win this battle.
I am positive prior art could be claimed for most if not all of those. Square Enix could cry afoul of the “mounting creatures” one as well as I’m sure many, many other earlier games on a plethora of platforms.
You could mount and ride Chocobos in Final Fantasy 2, i.e. the real “2,” the JDM only one on Famicom, which was released in 1988. The aforementioned patent was only filed on Nintendo’s part in 2024.
They can, to use a technical legal term, get fucked.
And while we’re at it, a physical tactile keyboard.
I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.
So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…
But if they omit the symbol entirely, they save 0.003 cents per unit, but they will continue to charge the same inflated retail price for it and all their cult members will cover for them by gushing about how sleek the “minimalist” design is.
We’re not calling it that anymore. It’s been rebranded to “SuperDuper Speed USB ]|[” now. Note that this is a different standard than the previous “SuperDuper Speed USB 3,” and under no circumstances should you call it “SuperDuper Speed USB 3.0,” because there was never any such spec and pedantic nerds will climb up your nose in the comments if you ever utter it.
Fucking magnets. Saved you a click.
(Magnetic clothing buttons have already been invented. Repeatedly. You can buy 20 for six bucks on Amazon.)
IKR?
Cheaters who cheat rather than learn don’t learn. More on this shocking development at 11.
If the US government bitching was enough to get the flight simulator easter egg removed from Excel (allegedly), I can’t imagine a similar stern glare from the Pentagon would not cause Recall to magically turn out to be uninstallable after all. At least from any US government owned computers originally so equipped.
Anyway, isn’t this only going to roll out on “Copilot” compatible PC’s with the requisite AI acceleration chips in them? I would be furthermore immensely surprised if it could not be locked out in Group Policy for corporate customers.
Nah, loot it for the magnets at least. Frisbee the platters, save the chassis for the scrap bucket (it’s solid aluminum).
And they had to work so hard to cook the books to make it look like it lost money on it so they didn’t have to pay out their cast and crew, too. Won’t anyone think of the poor executives!?!?
It’s possible just at the outside that one of the Waymo autonomous taxis could pull it off, but they rely on that giant sensor lump on the roof so you’d have nowhere to put your boat…
That, and every time I see video from one somehow the inbuilt cameras on a Tesla produce worse picture quality than a $30 Amazon dashcam. And why do they tint everything brown?
Yeah, this is why I’m not new car shopping. Like, ever. I’m done. I’ll drive my Crosstrek until the engine falls out, and then I’ll replace said engine with an EV powertrain and drive it some more.
This comes full circle with everyone’s grandma incessantly calling every piece of software on their computer “The Microsoft.”