Seems like it’s just a day for casual IP theft, mere moments after we learned that leaked GTA 6 footage was used in a Goat Simulator 3 advert, it seems an even bigger case was brewing right here in Australia.
As reported by our friends over at Vooks, The Pokémon Company has just come down on an Aussie crypto racket for blatantly using its intellectual property to market an unauthorised Pokémon NFT mobile game.
Trading as Pokémon Pty Ltd, the company had set up a website (which is still live) and social accounts (which are not) to promote the NFT game, titled PokeWorld. Operating under the studio name Kotiota, it claimed to be developing a game where players could buy and sell Pokémon and items as NFTs, battle other players and completely missions in the AR-enabled mobile app. The game’s roadmap had development extending into Q4 2023.
Of course, despite the PokeWorld website claiming that Kotiota was a listed contractor for The Pokémon Company Japan and had worked on a range of prior Pokémon games, not a sliver of this NFT project nor the company behind it is authorised or affiliated with the actual owners of the Pokémon property. The Pokémon Company International is naturally taking them to court, a case for which has been disclosed by the Federal Court of Australia.
Copyright and IP theft are ongoing issues in the NFT space and things like this are sadly not new, but this particular instance is of not purely for how blatantly these folks attempted to trade on property worth tens of billions of dollars, and because it’s all going down here on our shores.
Again, all credit goes to Vooks for breaking this one. Give the original story a read for their penetrating insight into the whole ordeal.
(Side note: I got a good chuckle out of noticing that the filename for the promotional video I downloaded to get this article’s header image was “tamagotchi.mp4”)
