Are Video Game Patents Next? 443
MarcOiL writes "Gamasutra is running an article titled It's Just a Game, Right? Top Mythconceptions on Patent Protection of Video Games where two IP lawyers try to convince the videogame industry of patenting everything in sight: ideas, technical contributions, etc. They show as an example a Microsoft patent on Scoring based upon goals achieved and subjective elements. They also have created a weblog, The Patent Arcade, to promote their business. Will this be the real end of innovation in videogames?"
D&D as Prior Art? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Video games... (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps I'm missing something... (Score:5, Insightful)
Note: I don't agree with software or videogame patents, because I think they screw the consumer in the end by providing a crappy product, at likely a high price. But still, that last sentence made no sense.
Patents (Score:2, Insightful)
However, video games don't give back the same benefits as say, food, energy and transportation. A fellow programmer once said to me "What if someone had a patent on the First Person Shooter?" Imagine how dead development would be in the video game genre!
John Carmack won't be happy with this :( (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:D&D as Prior Art? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps I'm missing something... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:D&D as Prior Art? (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to have missed the key prhases: "on the internet" or "using a computer". Those two phrases alone make the idea new and unique and prior art becomes moot... Atleast that's how it seems these days...
Re:yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Patents (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps I'm missing something... (Score:3, Insightful)
As unpopular an opinion as it is now a days, the good creative content is often built on older creative content. For instance, we couldn't have had hl/hl2/cs with out id and doom.
Interesting mental exercise: Imagine a world where ID DID patent Doom and it's methods.
Imagine patents on books. Or, more telling, on scientific works. That's what this amounts to: Creating games and the like are creative, but also utilize a very scientific method of using the work of others to further your own.
Incidently, this is also why everyone is against software patents. It will kill our software design industry.
What innovation? (Score:2, Insightful)
I didn't realize we still had innovation. I thought we had three or four basic games with improving graphics, different controls and the same generic UI. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy a lot of the games out there nowadays. But I haven't seen something real innovative in a while.
Re:Prior art available (Score:3, Insightful)
This sort of thing needs to stop NOW. Game companies that take out patents need to be boycotted when the word gets out to gaming fan sites, existing disks need to be returned to them in pieces.
But it won't happen. I guarantee it will never happen. We will bend over and ask for it harder and deeper once they dangle a few more shiny objects in front of us. And it'll be our fault. Fuck it, I think I'll still be allowed to go outside and have fun. But that will probably all be fenced off too.
Re:Perhaps I'm missing something... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if the guys who made marble madness had patented "Using an electronic input device to control a digital sphere through the visual representation of a three dimensional world"? I'm no patent lawyer, so I don't know how much sense that makes, but it reads about as basic and vague to me as most of the patent summaries I browse do.
By that measure, things like bowling games or Super Monkey Ball could be threatened. Is there a connection between Super Money Ball and marble madness? Yeah, on a really superficial level. Do the games play at all alike? Nope. Were the designers inspired by Marble Madness? Maybe. Did they ruthlessly steal expensively developed ideas from the Marble Madness developers? No.
Even Katamari Damacy could be argued to fall under a patent like that. And that's generally considered one of the most fun, original games of the past year.
I'm going to agree that any kind of software patents are going to be very harmful to the industry as a whole. And just shifting the current patent system to something like video games is going to pretty much be death to it.
The lawyer's argument is basically, getting patents is a way for the current players to make more money and cement their position on top of the biz. You can't seriously make the argument that, in this case, patents will spur on innovation, because there's been leaps and bounds of innovation in the relatively patent free video game universe since its inception.
Question (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps I'm missing something... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup. this one [newscientist.com] for example - sony patenting a technology that they themselves admit is just IP grabbing: "There were not any experiments done," she says. "This particular patent was a prophetic invention. It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."
I would find it funny if it didn't nauseate me.
Re:Human patents? (Score:1, Insightful)
at least that is what I'm getting from reading from the uspto site at...
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/
Parasites. (Score:5, Insightful)
Before issuing a condemnation, I try hard to think about it from their point of view -- the laws of the land set the rules of the game, and lawyers are deeply confused at why some of us aren't using all the tools that the game gives us.
Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah.
But in the majority of cases in software, patents effect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement.
Why should society reward that? What benefit does it bring? It doesn't help bring more, better, or cheaper products to market. Those all come from competition, not arbitrary monopolies. The programmer that filed the patent didn't work any harder because a patent might be available, solving the problem was his job and he had to do it anyway. Getting a patent is uncorrelated to any positive attributes, and just serves to allow either money or wasted effort to be extorted from generally unsuspecting and innocent people or companies.
Yes, it is a legal tool that may help you against your competitors, but I'll have no part of it. Its basically mugging someone.
I could waste hours going on about this. I really need to just write a position paper some day that I can cut and paste when this topic comes up.
John Carmack