Video Transcript

Auto-generated transcript. Timestamps are approximate.

Hey there, I’m Gary Schuster with Innovation Cafe, and today I want to briefly talk about the Nintendo lawsuit over Pokémon Go. Now, you might have heard that they filed a patent infringement suit over Pokémon Go patents. The thing is, it was only Japanese patents that were involved — or at least the reporting indicates that.

Well, here’s the trick about patents: they’re super territorial. So those patents’ validity ends at the shores of Japan. It should not affect anything you do in the US, unless of course they’re required to shut down in Japan, and then that might affect their revenue, et cetera. But you are not going to be infringing a Japanese patent based on activity taking part entirely in a different country, and neither will Nintendo’s competitors.

So we’ll have to see how it plays out. They may have counterparts in other countries that they’re planning to sue over. They may have other things that they intend to sue over, like copyright. But as it stands, I’m not putting a whole lot of value on Nintendo’s patent lawsuit outside of Japan. We’ll see how it develops. Thanks for watching!