There currently seems to be some sort of confusion among a lot of people concerning the ownership of the Professor Layton series. Some people seem to agree that Professor Layton is an intellectual property (IP) of both Nintendo and the series' developer Level-5, whilst others claim despite Nintendo's significant contribution to the series, Nintendo does not own the Professor Layton IP at all!
I looked around, and checked which statement is more accurate. Turns out this confusion is mostly due the fact Professor Layton is exclusive to Nintendo consoles, and the series is entirely localised and published by Nintendo in both the United States and Europe. However, legally speaking, the Professor Layton is more or less a third-party series!
Nintendo never published the games in Japan; publishing in Japan was handled by Level-5 themselves, but since the company isn't that big enough they asked Nintendo to help them localise the games elsewhere. If any of you people check disclaimers and indices on any of the games' packagings and official media, you'd notice Professor Layton is copyrighted only to Level-5. No mention of copyright to Nintendo whatsoever, even outside of Japan (with exception of the Nintendo DS trademarks). Therefore, Nintendo does not legally own the Professor Layton IP anywhere in the world.
Keep in mind that Level-5 is an independent, private Japanese video game developing company, and is not a subsidiary of Nintendo at any extent. Level-5 had released dozens of games for different consoles, not just Nintendo ones, and many of these games still remain Japan-only releases. Although, I recently heard that the first game in the sports RPG series, Inazuma Eleven, will finally see release outside of Japan in 2011 (by Nintendo), but only in Europe so far.
So, what do you people think?