The Pokémon Company, the business devoted entirely to managing all things Pokémon, has filed one hell of a lawsuit against the organisers of a PAX party that had been scheduled to go down last week.
As Motherboard reports, the Unofficial Poke’mon (sic) PAX Kickoff Party is in trouble for two things: the first is using Pokémon branding and character images on its promotional material, the second being that the organisers—Ramar Larkin Jones and Zach Shore—were charging for tickets.
Which, OK, they probably shouldn’t have been doing! At least so blatantly. A stern letter telling them to stop it and come up with their own party theme would probably have done the trick.
But nope. As you can see in the suit here, The Pokémon Company are going after these guys. They’re looking for statutory damages “within the higher range allowed” by law, the recovery of “attorneys’ fees and costs of suit” and “the actual damages suffered by TPCi as a result of Defendants’ infringement, and any profits of Defendants that are attributable to the infringement”, which in English means “all the money they made from previous editions of the party, which have been running since 2011”.
The Pokémon Company argue that their image has been hypothetically “damaged” by these parties, oblivious to the actual damage a punitive lawsuit like this is doing. Events like PAX are crawling with acts of “unlawful infringement” against countless characters and series.
It’s called “fandom”.
To single out one party of Pokémon fans—and not just shut it down but go overboard in punishing its organisers—just seems a total dick move.