Japan Patent Office Rebukes Nintendo's 'Absurd' Pokémon Patent Defence

Full text

While Nintendo has a long and infamous history of petty litigiousness, its recent efforts to secure a series of Pokémon-related patents have been particularly obnoxious —obnoxious enough that even the Japan Patent Office seems like its patience for the publisher's quibbling is wearing thin.

Earlier this month, Japanese patent examiners issued a rebuke of Nintendo's objections to a Patent Office's prior rejections of one of the publisher's Pokémon patent applications. In its refusal of the publisher's arguments, the JPO's examiner was so atypically blunt that experts like Japanese patent attorney Kiyoshi Kurihara have described the exchange as containing "things rarely seen in standard patent practice" (via Automaton ).

(Image credit: The Pokémon Company) At the heart of this particular squabble is Nintendo's Patent Application 2026-019762 , one of a number of patent applications the company has submitted in an attempt to secure ownership over systems related to Pokémon catching, battling, and riding. While the publisher has successfully been granted some of those patents—like those cited in its ongoing legal dispute with Palworld developer Pocketpair—the JPO sent a notice of refusal for the 2026-019762 patent application in April 2026.

Something can't be patented if it doesn't demonstrate "an inventive step" indicating it wouldn't be obvious for other practitioners in the relevant field, and the JPO examiner found that the Pokémon mechanics that the 2026-019762 application described were too similar to "prior art," or preexisting works. In particular, the application referenced a 13-year-old gameplay video of an unofficial, fan-made Pokémon game, which resembled many of the systems Nintendo claimed in its application over a decade later.

As you might expect, Nintendo didn't like that.

(Image credit: Nintendo) In June, as patent procedure allows, Nintendo submitted a written opinion contesting the application's refusal. First of all, Nintendo wrote—presumably while pushing up its glasses—the examiner didn't reference a fan game, but "merely a video" of a fan game; videos can't be considered disqualifying prior art for a videogame patent, it said, because videos aren't videogames. Worse, as an unlicensed work using Pokémon designs and characters, it's a video of copyright infringement . Something can't be considered obvious for practitioners in the field, Nintendo insists, if it's illegal.

Not only that, Nintendo said, but the examiner—despite the alleged copyright infringement on display—called the Pokémon shown in the video by their official, god-given Christian names like "Bulbasaur" and "Pikachu." It would have been more fitting, it said, to use language like "a character that infringes on Pikachu" or "a character that infringes on Bulbasaur."

"It is extremely inappropriate for the examiner to deliberately misidentify the infringing product as if it were a genuine product," Nintendo wrote.

(Image credit: Pocketpair) Unfortunately for Nintendo, that's not how anything works, and the JPO said as much in its decision of refusal sent earlier this month.

Nintendo's assertion of copyright infringement, the JPO examiner notes, has no bearing on considerations of patentability, because Japanese patent law "contains no provision excluding inventions that infringe upon the copyright of others." Whether or not a cited work infringes on copyright, the examiner continues, "is irrelevant to the inventive step judgment, and this view is considered standard among patent practitioners."

Further, the JPO said that it would be "an absurd misunderstanding" to think that its examiners misidentified the fan game as an authentic Pokémon product, and even if there were "the possibility that the reasons for refusal could be subject to such an absurd misunderstanding," it would still have "no bearing on the inventive step judgment."

(Image credit: Nintendo) Even the JPO examiner seems baffled by why Nintendo objected to using a gameplay video as evidence, writing that they're unclear whether Nintendo thinks a video of gameplay can't sufficiently demonstrate the relevant software concepts, or that Nintendo thinks it could be a video animation meant to look like a videogame and narrated as such by the uploader. The former, the examiner says, is more than sufficient evidence for refusal, while the latter is "too ridiculous" to consider.

The best bit, however, is where the examiner addresses Nintendo's complaints about misusing official Pokémon terminology by deploying Advanced Pedantry:

"If it's impermissible to refer to the character name in the reasons for refusal, then—accepting some redundancy in favor of precision—the elements should have been identified as follows: 'an object in the form of a small animal' instead of 'Pokémon'; 'an object in the form of a boy wearing a red hat' instead of 'Ash'; 'an object in the form of a small yellow animal' instead of 'Pikachu'; 'an object in the form of a small green animal' instead of 'Bulbasaur'; and 'a spherical object with a red upper half and a white lower half' instead of 'Poké Ball.'"

(Image credit: Nintendo, USPTO) But, the examiner says, even if those terms were used, it wouldn't make the application's claims any more inventive, so the JPO's judgment remains unchanged. Oh well.

Despite how thoroughly the refusal reads like a proverbial newspaper swat on the nose, GamesFray notes that Nintendo has three months to petition for an appeal trial before JPO judges, and could still file further divisional patent applications with more carefully-crafted claims. And since this application is unrelated to the Palworld dispute, it won't have any bearing there either way.

Still, it's nice to know we're not the only ones who find this whole thing exhausting.

2026 games : All the upcoming games

Best PC games : Our all-time favorites

Free PC games : Freebie fest

Best FPS games : Finest gunplay

Best RPGs : Grand adventures

Best co-op games : Better together