The investigation as to who managed to leak the Pokemon Sword and Shield guidebook continues. As reported upon last month, The Pokemon Company International took the initial steps to begin a lawsuit against a group of users who managed to leak images pertaining to Pokemon Sword and Shield, weeks prior to release. These images originated from an official guidebook, with the contents so closely guarded, that it released a week after the aforementioned games. When the images were shared online and went viral, The Pokemon Company and its representing law firm claimed that it caused "irreparable injury" to the company and brand. Previously, they were seeking a subpoena against both Discord and 4Chan, where the leaks supposedly originated. The motion has now been granted, and both sites/services will now be required to give any information that could lead to the identification of the three leakers.

Before the Court is Plaintiff The Pokémon Company International, Inc.’s (“TPCi”) Ex Parte Motion for Expedited Discovery. Having considered TPCi’s Motion and all other pleadings and papers on file in this matter, this Court hereby GRANTS the Motion. TPCi may serve subpoenas on Discord, 4chan, and DimensioNz#3307 before the Parties’ Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(f) conference.

Source

Tags: [COMPANY=/company/the-pokemon-company-international]The Pokémon Company International[/COMPANY]

 

[DarkKaine]

Yeah, I'm sure this lead to "irreparable injury" /s
I didn't even know about this, then again I've been on my pokenerd hiatius for over a decade.
If anything, this is free advertising and building hype.
Unless your game sucks and the images exposed it.

 

[ChaosEternal]

As important as it is to protect an IP, I do wish they would have used that energy to have finished polishing their game. Sword and Sheild are fun but they have a lot of flaws.

To be fair, I rather doubt that they're making the developers do the legal work, lol. Of course, that just gives them even less of an excuse for the state of the game.

As it was already said, Nintendo has to expect the game to be considered as released the very moment they send the games. Arbitrarly deciding of a release date and then trying to sue those whose stores sold the game early is idiotic at best and insane at worst.

Oh, and in addition, it gives me a lot of bad faith vibes from Nintendo. I was a fervent buyer of new Nintendo (and especially Pokémon) games, but no more since they went with that decision, as that is the only way to show them how I don't support these policies.

Isn't that standard practice within the industry? The only way to ensure that all of the shops have it by release day is to send it early and then trust that they won't start selling it on arrival. If they all decided to sell on arrival, then you'd have mass confusion since they might get it on different days.

 

[TankedThomas]

Absolutely pathetic.

There's still no proof, at least publicly, that these people were under NDA.

Don't Nintendo have something better to do, such as kissing China's ass more?

 

[chartube12]

before people get all pissy over this. These people deserve this 10000000%. Don't want to risk getting in trouble? don't leak stuff. And for all of you who will have some smart comment to say.. just think if this was your work that you put a lot of time into only to have some idiot leaked your stuff that had a strict release date. I bet you would sue aas well.

bullshit! The guide books for the pokémon games have always gone on sell in the us before the games!!!! Anywhere from a week to a month! Nintendo can go fuck themselves with this nonsense. it’s not gamers fault that gamefreak has never grown from indie size. it’s not our fault they fucked up from a pr stand point from E3 til weeks after the games release. it’s not our fault the game is riddled with bugs and exploits due to rush development. All the blame goes to the poor management at gf and the pokémon company. Gamers shouldn’t get punished for poor management. i’d had enough of this shit from them. Sword is my last pokémon game. this lawsuit is a nuisance suit. unfortunately nintendo has the financial power to screw people’s lives up. And it is completely unfair and unjust

 

[Kadji]

„These images originated from an official guidebook, with the contents so closely guarded, that it released a week after the aforementioned games.“

Guys, i did not read every post but please...
Nintendo is not going after fans that got their game a day or two earlier. They are going after the people that were in the production / delivery line of the guidebook and had written an NDA.
And if you break a NDA you 100% deserve it. Same as the guy that leaked fortnite stuff and got suid by epic games. Break NDA, get rekt.

 

[Foxi4]

Waste of time and money, I have no idea why they're even bothering pursuing this at all.

 

[jurai]

They can "leak" anything if they already got the game delivered to them. Nintendo sent out the games... Its not like someone stole the cartridges and spread them on the internet.
In such a scenario it isn't even a "leak" since... again... Nintendo sent out the games. Which means the games had a release date BEFORE 14.11 BECAUSE Nintendo sent them out earlier.

You as a normal consumer DO NOT need to know the "official releasedate". You DO NOT need to be a expert. If you purchase the game and the game gets delivered to you, you CAN share game info with other people on the internet. No matter when the so called "release date" is.

Nintendo loses the right of keeping game information secret at the moment where they ship the games out to you/to stores that are selling them earlier.

Did you even read the post? The leaks weren't from early retail copies of the game

 

[KiokiN]

Holy shit Nintendo takes leaks WAAAY too seriously. This was probably leaked by some bored 16 year old, and now he is going to get fucked.

 

[deisuke1234]

I understand that leaking a game is not nice to do. However if the game was really good than I think even leaks could become a way to sell the game even better.

 

[KiokiN]

I understand that leaking a game is not nice to do. However if the game was really good than I think even leaks could become a way to sell the game even better.

The game wasn't even leaked, the fucking guidebook was.

 

[deisuke1234]

My bad from my part but my point is a good game with a decent guide book could have turned the leak thing into a profit

 

[Om3Ga1337]

Did the guide book "leaked" after Nintendo sent the first guide books out or before?

 

[Danethos86]

Wasnt a gamestore sued as well on previous games for early release on stocks due to a new worker putting them on shelves accidentally in uk or some sort. Think was around omega ruby alpha sapphire due to was one first world releases.

 

[osaka35]

They can "leak" anything if they already got the game delivered to them. Nintendo sent out the games... Its not like someone stole the cartridges and spread them on the internet.
In such a scenario it isn't even a "leak" since... again... Nintendo sent out the games. Which means the games had a release date BEFORE 14.11 BECAUSE Nintendo sent them out earlier.

You as a normal consumer DO NOT need to know the "official releasedate". You DO NOT need to be a expert. If you purchase the game and the game gets delivered to you, you CAN share game info with other people on the internet. No matter when the so called "release date" is.

Nintendo loses the right of keeping game information secret at the moment where they ship the games out to you/to stores that are selling them earlier.

definitely not wrong. but this isn't quite what's happening

this is about the book, contracts, and official channels. think employees leaking sensitive information from their workplace. doesn't matter who else knows it, you can't do that junk.

 

[Newwaverap]

Lol at the “shitty game” comments. Best Pokémon game hands down and that’s the vast majority opinion. The small amount of people who say this game is “crap” are probably also in the flat earth movement, anything to go against the flow and be different and “woke”. If you spent time effort and money to put something together for fans of your work and tried to keep things under wraps to surprise your fans and some asshole leaked all your work NOT in the way you intended to do it you would sue as well. What’s bad about this game? The fact that they upgraded the mechanics to make it way easier to get competitive Pokémon? That they spent the bulk of the time making the battle animations smooth and vibrant? That they gave you minor changes that helped in the adventure like 2 nurseries with ample room to walk, access to your Pokémon boxes from anywhere? Raid battles you can do online or with friends locally? OMG they didn’t include the other 500 Pokémon who the hell manages 1000 creatures in one game? This “hurt” their sales dues to the fact that they did not intend for all this stuff to leak before people got a chance to actually play the game, for pictures to be leaked and for people to start saying what a shit game this was due to a few leaked images and a 400 mon dex is ridiculous. And yet here they are, the people who “hate” this game, on every thread expressing their disdain for it lol, I didn’t watch or click on a single leak before release and played the game for 30 minutes and was absolutely hooked. So to the 37 of you that absolutely hate the game, why aren’t you spending more time playing something else and less time replying to threads on the game you have no interest in?? Lol, this is hilarious, it’s like vegans spending all this time making things that look and feel like meat...out of vegetables lololol. If you don’t like or want to eat meat then eat vegetables and stfu, you don’t see meat eaters grinding meat and making it in the shape of broccoli and carrots. Epstein didn’t kill himself.

 

[Garro]

before people get all pissy over this. These people deserve this 10000000%. Don't want to risk getting in trouble? don't leak stuff. And for all of you who will have some smart comment to say.. just think if this was your work that you put a lot of time into only to have some idiot leaked your stuff that had a strict release date. I bet you would sue aas well.

Imagine being more empathetic to the most successful brand in the world than an average human being where a lawsuit this magnitude would just destroy their life.

Just to remind you, taking pictures of a book, or leaking stuff is not illegal, there's a reason NDA exist, Pokemon Company is pursuing this case as a "damage of their brand", which is something they will have to demonstrate in court if this goes through.

If my work for some reason got leaked, it's mainly my responsibility, for better or worse leaks happen all the time, Super Smash being a clear example, you don't see companies suing every time a leak happen.

which would be the case if this is what was happening.

this is about the book, contracts, and official channels. think employees leaking sensitive information from their workplace. doesn't matter who else knows it, you can't do that junk.

I feel like if an internal employee leaked the pictures, they would be behind a NDA agreement and would be much easier to track than requesting Reddit/4chan for clues, and would use the breaking of the NDA as the reason behind the lawsuit instead of "irreparable damages to their image". But I suppose at this point we can only speculate.

 

[deisuke1234]

Lol at the “shitty game” comments. Best Pokémon game hands down and that’s the vast majority opinion. The small amount of people who say this game is “crap” are probably also in the flat earth movement, anything to go against the flow and be different and “woke”. If you spent time effort and money to put something together for fans of your work and tried to keep things under wraps to surprise your fans and some asshole leaked all your work NOT in the way you intended to do it you would sue as well. What’s bad about this game? The fact that they upgraded the mechanics to make it way easier to get competitive Pokémon? That they spent the bulk of the time making the battle animations smooth and vibrant? That they gave you minor changes that helped in the adventure like 2 nurseries with ample room to walk, access to your Pokémon boxes from anywhere? Raid battles you can do online or with friends locally? OMG they didn’t include the other 500 Pokémon who the hell manages 1000 creatures in one game? This “hurt” their sales dues to the fact that they did not intend for all this stuff to leak before people got a chance to actually play the game, for pictures to be leaked and for people to start saying what a shit game this was due to a few leaked images and a 400 mon dex is ridiculous. And yet here they are, the people who “hate” this game, on every thread expressing their disdain for it lol, I didn’t watch or click on a single leak before release and played the game for 30 minutes and was absolutely hooked. So to the 37 of you that absolutely hate the game, why aren’t you spending more time playing something else and less time replying to threads on the game you have no interest in?? Lol, this is hilarious, it’s like vegans spending all this time making things that look and feel like meat...out of vegetables lololol. If you don’t like or want to eat meat then eat vegetables and stfu, you don’t see meat eaters grinding meat and making it in the shape of broccoli and carrots. Epstein didn’t kill himself.

I just think for starters what could be improved would be if they could add something that lets you choose the difficulty since the game in my opinion feels like to easy but than agian everyone is allowed to think different. Secondly indeed looking at the leaks might have made people disappointed. But what if you could turn the leaks into a selling point. I just hope we as a fans could make a change that is all.

 

[osaka35]

those involved with making this game won't have anything to do with the lawsuit, that'll be a division within nintendo/pokemon company completely separate from their game making side of things. they might even oppose the lawsuit, but it wouldn't matter to nintendo(Pokemon company?).

Imagine being more empathetic to the most successful brand in the world than an average human being where a lawsuit this magnitude would just destroy their life.

Just to remind you, taking pictures of a book, or leaking stuff is not illegal, there's a reason NDA exist, Pokemon Company is pursuing this case as a "damage of their brand", which is something they will have to demonstrate in court if this goes through.

If my work for some reason got leaked, it's mainly my responsibility, for better or worse leaks happen all the time, Super Smash being a clear example, you don't see companies suing every time a leak happen.

I feel like if an internal employee leaked the pictures, they would be behind a NDA agreement and would be much easier to track than requesting Reddit/4chan for clues, and would use the breaking of the NDA as the reason behind the lawsuit instead of "irreparable damages to their image". But I suppose at this point we can only speculate.

they've always had leaks before, so i can only assume something about this one is different. unless all those leaks were official leaks, ya know? This may be a trash lawsuit or a super valid one, but I'd like to know the details. Feels like there's something substantial is there, but you're right, don't know really.

 

[Deleted User]

They not gonna stop until they catch em all!

 

[Pipistrele]

If only the were so convinced with making the game better, not sue everybody.

As important as it is to protect an IP, I do wish they would have used that energy to have finished polishing their game.

they've already spent more on this than on the game itself.

I don't think lawyers from unrelated law firm would make for good game developers, though.