This is going to be a long post, and honestly if it wasn't for
@TheLegalMindset egging me on to really to also dig into this very odd but disturbingly increasingly common thing that keeps happening in recent decade, I might not have. I am not the biggest fan of Nintendo products, but I can identify odd symptoms when I see them.
As always, these are my opinions. I'm sure someone who cares enough and disagrees with me can add more to it.
It is very hard to not notice the path Pokemon Company is taking, a proverbial scorch-earth of what is basically the most uncalled-for and petty attempts at suing and legally-threatening anyone and everyone from enjoying Pokemon in various forms, and just being fans.
The very extensive amounts of IP patents and Copyright lawsuits, and how there are legal threats after legal threats being thrown around at just about everyone.
From the high profile Palworld Lawsuits...to threatening legal action against fan parties or the briefest showing of anything audio/visual - to the very recent Pokemon patent that essentially makes "summoning characters and making them battle" an Intellectual property.
Now I may not know for a fact why Pokemon Co patented that specific mechanic, but I am quite certain its not there just to be there lets put it that way...
Suffice to say the proverbial warpath Pokemon Company has been on is really obnoxious to me, and has drawn a lot of eyes too.
So much so, that people have dug the usual places - especially LinkedIn and many other publicly available repositories of information.
People like Legal Mindset, identified based on [publicly available] information, Pokemon Company International's Chief Legal Officer: Jennifer Liu. Assumed the position around 2021, for Pokemon Company International.
It was during her ongoing role in this position, that me and many others noticed the ramping up. It is also tangentially relevant to know that before she became CLO of Pokemon Company International, she was a senior Legal counsel in Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), note that for later.
It was also as this situation keeps ramping up, that an interview with Chief Legal Officer was found : a 24 minute interview between her and a person named Richard.
In the interview (I will, Jennifer mentioned some very interesting things that give quite a bit of illumination on Pokemon Company's very litigious behaviour:
The CLO:
-chose Law due to Activism (keep in mind for now)
-worked in Intellectual Property law
-started her career in a "Litigation shop", i.e. Law Firm that did a lot of Lawfare
-had a very STRONG interest in preliminary injunction (quickly shutting people down, e.g. filing lawsuits against modding communities, fan events etc)
-gets excited for large LITIGATION cases, visibly enthusiastic about them
I started to contemplate, and I'm sure I'm not the only one...when you are running a business and ESPECIALLY a profit-minded Corporation. Making money, minimising losses are key.
And filing lawsuits...costs A LOT of money. With the amount of gratuitous lawfare activity Pokemon Company International now does...I hazard to guess that their line-item for Lawsuits in their Profit and Loss is quite the sizeable sum.
Long story short, anyone and everyone hates lawsuits, whether they are filing them or responding to them. This is doubly so for profit-minded entities like Corporations.
So the question to me is WHY does Pokemon legal team, under the leadership of Jennifer Liu - keep looking for an excuses after excuses to sue? Likely being a money drain in the process?
In fact, WHY was she even given the role of Chief Legal Officer?
A proper general counsel, inhouse Corporate lawyer, would do anything and everything AVOID litigation. It would ordinarily be quite the mark against you as an inhouse lawyer, if you drag your employer into lawsuits when there is a peaceful resolution available.
So again...why? Why would an employee of a Corporation, seemingly undermine the profitability or at the very least, create problems that have to be rectified by the Corporation?
Again go back to the Interview, and her noting that she got into Law because of Activism. It is not unreasonable to infer that the method by which she entered into the Legal Field, has already created a specific mindset as she would undertake her jobs.
If I had to guess or speculate, a very adversarial mindset. Caring less about harmony and smootheness, caring most about conflict.
This compounded by the customary roles of Legal Counsels back during the late 2010s and even to recent years, "Compliance and Risk assessment"
- which translates to meeting "Compliance" standards that were set up back then and to a large extent still remain till this day
- standards that are incidentally, derived from Environment, Social, Governance guidelines - ESG
- the senior/head legal counsel, from what I gathered doing a bit of look-see; is kind of like the "supervisors" towards ESG efforts being implemented Corporation-wide.
-Sure the "Chief Diversity Officers" are the front-facing of these policies, but its not unreasonable to recognise that the Legal Counsels that are in "advisory roles" to Corporations on compliance, would have a lot to do with guiding policy implementation as well.
Lastly, and to me quite oddly:
-Corporations and countries that go deep into ESG tend to have a history of major financial blunders, or in the case of Countries...a complete breakdown (see Sri Lanka, again)
-Corporations that go deep into ESG do not make much money, and rely on funding from "Impact Investors"
This in fact tracks during her stint with SIE, as during her time there we see for instance:
1. lot of news about Sony Interactive Entertainment going on massive censorship campaigns, forcing compliance on Japanese devs, and even forcing JP devs to SPEAK ENGLISH in their correspondences.
2. the greenlighting of projects like Concord, which was presumably approved and entered pre-production around 2016
Ok before I get even more schizo with this post - I want to go back to the key question...why does Nintendo and Pokemon Company HQ in Japan ALLOW this to happen?
Well the question then is, did they "allow" or did they "not know"?
In my opinion, and in the opinions of quite a lot of people, Pokemon Company JP is largely hands-off with the affairs of its overseas branches, and gives Pokemon Company US a large degree of autonomy.
This compounded by possible lost in translation, likely means that Pokemon Co International has its own little "clique" operation...and this by extension would obfuscate the presence of so many capricious lawfare actions conducted by it.
So yeah...its a very odd series of events, and doubly odd that Pokemon Company has decided to assign a person who is very enthusiastic about litigations, to be CLO - when any reasonable Corporation would shudder over the thought of so many lawsuits.
Honesty at the end of this, I wonder if what I just rambled on is just that, a silly ramble...
Or is there REALLY something that runs deeper?
#株式会社ポケモン #KabushikiGaishaPokemon