00:00The Japanese Patent Office has officially had enough of Nintendo.
00:04Rejecting a patent attached to the Power World lawsuit with rarely seen sass, the application
00:09covers Pokemon-style monster-catching mechanics, but examiners argued the idea wasn't inventive
00:15enough over earlier games and existing examples.
00:18What's really getting attention, though, is the wording of the rejection.
00:21According to Japanese patent experts, the patent office used unusually blunt language
00:26while pushing back on Nintendo's arguments.
00:29At one point, Nintendo objected to the office citing an unofficial Pokemon fan game as prior
00:34art because it allegedly infringed copyright.
00:37The patent's response, copyright doesn't affect whether an invention is inventive.
00:42It pointed out that, if Nintendo insisted, it could replace every Pokemon name with descriptions
00:47like a small yellow animal instead of Pikachu or a spherical object with a red upper half
00:52and a white lower half instead of a Pokeball, but it said it wouldn't change the legal reasoning
00:57anyway.
00:58This isn't the exact patent at the centre of Nintendo's lawsuit against Power World, and
01:02Nintendo has already appealed the rejection, but because it's part of the same patent family,
01:07the decision could still matter as the case continues.
