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Product Reviews

Strava sues Garmin in bizarre patent infringement lawsuit

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Fitness tech appears to be having a strange spat. Earlier this week, Strava filed a lawsuit alleging that Garmin infringed on its patents for two features related to tracking exercise routes: segments and heatmaps. It’s also claiming that Garmin violated a Master Cooperation Agreement by developing its own heat map feature. The complaint (via The Verge) is seeking a permanent injunction to stop Garmin from selling any items with segments or a heat map features, which would amount to a majority of Garmin’s hardware products as well as its Connect tracking program.

The lawsuit on its own is a surprise. Strava and Garmin are two major players in fitness tech that have worked together for about a decade, the pair have a number of integrations between their platforms. It also seems unlikely that Strava will make much headway with the case. DC Rainmaker, which first picked up on the lawsuit, has a thorough timeline of the companies’ patent filings that strongly suggests the arguments won’t hold water in court. It’s also strange that these alleged infringements, by Strava’s own assertions, began a long time ago and yet the company is only taking issue with them now.

But the situation got even stranger when Strava Chief Product Officer Matt Salazar took to Reddit today to give some insight into why the company is taking such aggressive action against a frequent partner. According to Salazar’s post, Strava is invoking the lawyers because Garmin is adopting new developer guidelines for API partners “that required the Garmin logo to be present on every single activity post, screen, graph, image, sharing card etc.” Although he frames it as a move to protect users’ data, the argument sounds more like a petty complaint that Garmin is putting its brand on the data its products are used to collect.

It’s a weird lawsuit, and hopefully one that won’t cause any disruptions for either company’s customers.



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Nintendo patents in-game characters summoning others to battle
Esports

Nintendo argues mods should not count as “prior art” in Pocketpair patent lawsuit

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Nintendo has argued that mods should not count as “prior art” in its patent lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair.

According to Games Fray, which sent a “neutral person” to inspect the Nintendo v. Pocketpair case file, Nintendo does not want mods to be recognised as prior art in the lawsuit, which the publication explained is “previously published material that could be held against its patents.”

In February 2025, Pocketpair filed multiple “preparatory briefs,” according to Games Fray, arguing that Nintendo’s patent lawsuit shouldn’t have been granted as there was prior art “before the relevant priority date that already covered what Nintendo claimed to have invented.”

Pocketpair’s invalidity arguments pointed to a number of mods as proof of this, including the Dark Souls 3 meets Pokémon mod, Pocket Souls, the Pixelmon mod for Minecraft, and the NukaMon mod for Fallout 4.

Nintendo has argued, however, that mods are not prior art as they cannot run independently, unlike the games they run on.

“This does not convince us from a patent law point of view,” Games Fray said. “The question is not whether a gamer who sees the game would likely use the mod or the other way round. What matters is whether game makers looking for inspiration would turn to mods. Of course they would.”

The judge in the case will decide whether mods do, in fact, count as prior art, but Games Fray reports that its sister site, ip fray, noted that courts usually reject these attempts to “narrow the pool for prior art references in unreasonable ways.”

Games Fray also reported that there “clearly are delays” with the case and “it looks like nothing will happen in that litigation during the remainder of this year.”

Last week, Pocketpair announced it is aiming for Palworld to exit early access in 2026, despite the ongoing lawsuit.



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Wario grinning and dancing with a pair of JoyCons.
Gaming Gear

Nintendo reportedly gets even more obnoxious about patent law by taking a ‘mods aren’t real games’ stance against a Dark Souls 3 mod that could invalidate its Palworld lawsuit

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Last year, Nintendo initiated a patent lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, and in the months since the Pokemon publisher has seemingly decided to double down on moustache-twirling IP law villainy at every opportunity. The latest development in the Pocketpair proceedings might be Nintendo’s worst look yet, because the company has reportedly decided that modders’ ideas don’t count. Cool!

Thanks to the efforts of a Tokyo contributor who was able to review the case file for the ongoing Pocketpair lawsuit, videogame patent law site Games Fray (which broke last week’s Nintendo patent story) reports that part of Pocketpair’s defense against Nintendo’s lawsuit aims to invalidate Nintendo’s patent claims based on the existence of prior art in mods.

(Image credit: Pocketpair / Toasted Shoes / The Pokemon Company)

As IP attorney Kirk Sigmon told PC Gamer last September, demonstrable prior art—meaning preexisting work resembling the invention described in a patent’s claims—is bad news for patent holders, because it means they shouldn’t have been granted the patent in the first place. Sigmon said that courts in Japan have a strong history of siding with patent lawsuit defendants who could present examples of prior art.


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By presenting mods like Pocket Souls for Dark Souls 3, which allowed the player to capture enemies in a method resembling Nintendo’s JP 2023-092953 patent claims, Pocketpair is hoping to demonstrate that Nintendo was granted a patent on ideas that had already been deployed in game design. If it’s successful, it could render Nintendo’s patent invalid.

According to Games Fray, however, Nintendo has argued in two separate pleadings that mods simply don’t qualify as prior art, because they aren’t real games.

(Image credit: Nintendo)

To evaluate this, let’s consider the conditions for patentability in Japanese patent law, as translated by Japan’s Ministry of Justice:

Article 29

  • (1) A person that invents an invention with industrial applicability may obtain a patent for that invention, unless the invention is as follows:
    • (i) an invention that is public knowledge within Japan or in a foreign country prior to the filing of the patent application;
    • (ii) an invention that is publicly known to be worked within Japan or in a foreign country prior to the filing of the patent application; or
    • (iii) an invention that is described in a distributed publication or made available for public use over telecommunications lines within Japan or in a foreign country prior to the filing of the patent application.
  • (2) A person may not obtain a patent if prior to the filing of the patent application, a person of ordinary skill in the art of the invention would have easily been able to make that invention based on an invention prescribed in one of the items of the preceding paragraph, notwithstanding the preceding paragraph.

Now, I’m not an expert, but I don’t see anything in there that says “Nintendo gets a pass if it doesn’t think creators of prior art deserve to have ideas.”

It’s an argument that doesn’t just insult the creativity of modders—it imperils them. If Nintendo’s rationale was accepted by the Tokyo District Court, it could create a world in which a developer of a “real” game might patent gameplay mechanics inspired by a mod and then hit that mod’s creator with a cease and desist for infringing on their own ideas.

Nintendo has already demonstrated it’s perfectly happy to hammer modders with legal action, having previously issued DMCA notices that drove Garry’s Mod to remove Nintendo-related items from Steam Workshop and forced Breath of Wild multiplayer modders to shut down development.

In a just world—which, considering Nintendo’s legal oeuvre, we probably shouldn’t take as a given—it’s a ploy that wouldn’t stand. We’ll have to wait and see.



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Is Nintendo's potentially industry-changing new monster battling patent enforceable? We asked some lawyers
Game Reviews

Is Nintendo’s potentially industry-changing new monster battling patent enforceable? We asked some lawyers

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Nintendo has been granted a new patent in the US, following its ongoing patent infringement lawsuit with Palworld developer Pocketpair.


The new patent, granted last week by the US Patent and Trademark Office, covers the gameplay mechanic of summoning a sub-character to let it fight another. The patent application was filed in March 2023 and has been granted without objection (thanks Games Fray).


Such a patent would not only implicate Palworld with its monster summoning and battling, but many similar games from long-standing rival Digimon, to the forthcoming Honkai: Nexus Anima and DokeV, as well as indies like Temtem and Cassette Beasts.


There are a number of steps in the patent pertaining to the gameplay mechanic, as follows:

  1. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having stored therein a game program, the game program causing a processor of an information processing apparatus to execute:
  2. performing control of moving a player character on a field in a virtual space, based on a movement operation input;
  3. performing control of causing a sub character to appear on the field, based on a first operation input, and
  4. when an enemy character is placed at a location where the sub character is caused to appear, controlling a battle between the sub character and the enemy character by a first mode in which the battle proceeds based on an operation input, and
  5. when the enemy character is not placed at the location where the sub character is caused to appear, starting automatic control of automatically moving the sub character that has appeared; and
  6. performing control of moving the sub character in a predetermined direction on the field, based on a second operation input, and, when the enemy character is placed at a location of a designation, controlling a battle between the sub character and the enemy character by a second mode in which the battle automatically proceeds.


All of these steps must be followed for Nintendo to have a case, but in theory it could launch an infringement lawsuit against a number of games with this patent now in place.

But is this patent enforceable through further lawsuits from Nintendo?


Don McGowan, former chief legal officer at The Pokémon Company, believes the patent will likely be ignored. “I wish Nintendo and Pokémon good luck when the first other developer just entirely ignores this patent and, if those companies sue that developer, the developer shows decades of prior art,” he told Eurogamer, adding: “This isn’t Bandai Namco with the loading screen patent”.

“The filing for such patent protection indicates that Nintendo does intend to pursue a legal strategy in defending itself against entrants in the pocket monster genre,” games industry lawyer Richard Hoeg told Eurogamer. “But that strategy may or may not involve lawsuits, as the ‘muddying of the waters’ effected by the patents existence may be enough to deter investment in and creation of competitors. That is, if Nintendo looks like it could pounce, that may be enough. No actual pouncing required.”

What’s more, the patent is broad and Nintendo won’t want to jeopardise seeing it narrowed in the context of a legal challenge, Hoeg explained.

“So yes, it’s enforceable in so far as it has been granted,” said Hoeg, “but Nintendo likely knows it ‘got away with one’ here and would prefer not to make a court actually sign off.”

What’s more worrying for Hoeg is whether the USPTO is “up to the task” when it comes to games patents. “Law and technology are often strange bedfellows, and in my opinion the patent office has appeared out of its depth on evaluating video games for quite some time,” said Hoeg. “It may be time for reform there.”


At the least, the patent is certainly worrying for the games industry in the face of creativity and developer freedom.


Already Pocketpair has altered gameplay in Palworld as part of its ongoing lawsuit with Nintendo, despite disputing the claims of copyright infringement.

The patent is also well-timed ahead of Nintendo’s forthcoming Pokémon Legends: Z-A, due out on 16th October.



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