TWeaK

The two devs themselves are massive tankies. They also run lemmygrad.

lemm.ee has one of if not the best admin, and was always running more smoothly in earlier versions. More than that, when other bugs were taking out .world and many others, lemm.ee was already immune and the admin helped the other instances sort theirs out too. lemm.ee has a lot of good users.

However, when hexbear was banned, users on that instance started moonlighting on other instances. There were very few instances that were still federated with hexbear but also with the others, where all the conversation was - many wanted one account that could browse both. Several went to lemmy.ml, the instance run by the formal lemmy developers, and there was a noticeable shift in user behaviour from the instance. But lemm.ee never really was targeted by the hexbear brigading that led to their defederation with everyone else, perhaps because lemm.ee doesn’t really have any massive communities itself, not as big as the others.

So yeah, lemm.ee can still browse hexbear, and with that you get a sizeable chunk of their userbase spilling over. So some lemm.ee users do indeed suck. It’s not as bad as .ml, though, and I think that’s in no small part thanks to the lemm.ee admin team keeping the more extremist users in check.

Yeah the newer they are, the more frivolous they are - especially since you could argue the release of games using those patents amounts to public disclosure.

However, you’re still left in the situation where an established patent is very solid and difficult to challenge, even when it should never have been granted in the first place.

5 mil yen is about $32k. In total they’re suing for about $100k.

I would imagine the 3rd patent at the very least should be invalidated - riding characters in video games predates Pokemon (MegaMan riding Rush comes to mind, as well as World of Warcraft [although I don’t know if the patent predates WOW mounts]). However the nature of patents is that once they’re granted they are very difficult to dismiss.

The other two are more tricky. Throwing balls at something us a uniquely Pokémon idea, I think, and the aiming one would come down to the technicalities of the patent itself, which is all Japanese to me.

US government: “Make us an app that people can use to subvert suppressive regimes.”

Developer: *makes Signal*

US Citizens: “Hey, that’s a useful app…” *installs*

US Government: “No, not like that!”