While Nintendo has a long and infamous history of petty litigiousness, its recent efforts to secure a series of Pokémon-related patents have been particularly obnoxious—obnoxious enough that even the Japan Patent Office seems like its patience for the publisher's quibbling is wearing thin.
Earlier this month, Japanese patent examiners issued a rebuke of Nintendo's objections to a Patent Office's prior rejections of one of the publisher's Pokémon patent applications. In its refusal of the publisher's arguments, the JPO's examiner was so atypically blunt that Japanese patent attorney Kiyoshi Kurihara described the exchange as containing "things rarely seen in standard patent practice" (via Automaton).
