Forum Thread

It's a simply question that can be debated. I was wondering if this website had the rights to use the sprites and the pokemon story to profit? This trigerred my attention when Flight rising banned trades that involves pokemon due to copyright claims. So i was wondering if this website is licensed by Gamefreak or nintendo to use the pokemon story.

If you ask me, i think this game falls under fair use as this game is a parody pokemon and doesn't use the actual game as much as it uses the story of emera town, but i'm a bit sceptic.

I think it's used legitly. Even if Riako doesn't have the actual Gamefreak and Nintendo's permission (I'm not sure!), the real owner is fairly credited.
"Pokémon names and sprites © 1995-2016 Nintendo, The Pokémon Company and Gamefreak"

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Copyright infringement happens regardless of whether there is profit being made. Usually, the 'takedowns' people hear about are because the copyright holder (Nintendo) believe that the infringing site is taking their profit away.
For instance, uploading a ROM of an original Pokemon game online is illegal and will be taken down, and I know this because I've seen a case on a retro gaming website where Nintendo had contacted them, telling them to take down all Nintendo game ROMs that were uploaded. This is because people would play the games online for free, instead of buying them. (And these were old gameboy games, so you should probably figure out how they would react if it was more recent games).
Pokeheroes uses images, sprites, and includes some features that originally belong to Gamefreak, Nintendo & The Pokemon Company. PokeHeroes is not like the original Pokemon games. It has a different main 'goal' people strive for. Here it's hatching eggs.
It's like you said, sites like this could be considered parodies. Also why we have various different event Pokemon.

This site will not take away from Nintendo's profit and it's completely different from original games. If people want to play the actual Pokemon games, they can buy it. If people want to play a game like PokeHeroes, they can play it, and pay for more features if they want to.

If they wanted, they could take down or limit the features of fan sites like Pokemon Showdown, Serebii, Bulbapedia etc for using their copyrighted materials.
They do not take these kind of sites down because it's beneficial for them. It raises awareness about a certain thing, which would potentially convince the person to buy the original products/games. (Free marketing for them)

So to conclude, yes it's legal.

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iirc right you buy game items, not pokemon themselves, which helps keep it kosher. selling the sprites themselves would probably be technically selling fanart, and selling the actual in-game pokemon sprites as game items would be iffy.

this explains why selling events are ok, they're not copyrighted

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Interesting topic and read. Thanks for starting the thread and everyone who replied.

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