NFT developers of the Pokémon game are being sued

The developers of the NFT Pokémon game PokeWorld, who illegally use Pokémon images in their project, have been sued by the copyright holders. According to Kotaku, the management of The Pokemon Company (TPC), which owns all the rights to the Pokemon brand, might not have learned about the fraudsters if they had not exposed themselves.

After the launch of their website, PokeWorld developers sent a press release to gaming portals trying to convince journalists to cooperate with The Pokemon Company. This is how the Pokémon rights holders learned about PokeWorld. TPC hired a cybercrime investigation team and tried to resolve the conflict with PokeWorld peacefully. However, nothing happened, so The Pokemon Company filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court of Australia, where the first hearing was held on December 21.

The NFT game PokeWorld belongs to the Melbourne-based Pokemon Pty studio, which produces its products under the name Kotiota Studios. The company is owned by Xiaoyan Liu, but there is no detailed information about him. PokeWorld users are offered to fight Pokémon and receive POKESHARD cryptocurrency for successful battles. Using POKESHARD, players can buy collectible PokeWorld NFTs.

According to the court’s decision, the developers of Kotiota Studios were ordered to stop attributing themselves to The Pokemon Company. PokeWorld was also banned from using copyrighted Pokémon images and claiming that the Pokémon NFTs are related to TPC.

Since the creation of the Pokémon brand in 1996, the fictional character has remained popular, and many users still want to get their own Pokémon. Developer Justin Pinckney went further and created an artificial intelligence model that creates Pokémon that look like humans — just describe the desired character in detail and the AI will create a Pokémon copy.

The development of a Pokémon takes an average of 86 seconds, but it may depend on the complexity of the input data. The most popular Pokémon are those of famous politicians, including George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Boris Johnson.