Slashdot Mirror
Are Video Game Patents Next?
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?"
"where two IP lawyers try to convince the videogame industry of patenting everything in sight: ideas, technical contributions, etc. "
Q. What do you have when you have 2 lawyers buried up to their necks in cement?
A. Not enough cement.
I thought I remembered seeing a Slashdot story or post about Namco holding a patent on "displaying a mini-game while the actual game is loading" not too long ago.
I would imagine any D&D would be prior art in a general games category? MSoft wasn't exactly the first company to get into games. I'm not sure how they can get a pantent on how points are awarded. Any D&D DM has subjective power to award points, and MS didn't exactly put D&D out there.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Will this be the real end of innovation in videogames?"
Yes.
Wow that was an easy Ask Slashdot!
"And then I visited Wikipedia
You mean until EA starts patenting everything in sight.
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 are provided to people of the United States (and other countries) to hold a 'temporary monopoly' on a product or idea. They are used to encourage developers to create things without their ideas being stolen. This enhances the level of development in the country as a whole, and is good for our economy and society.
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!
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Signed,
Human Capacity for Lameness is Apparently Inexhaustible, Esq.
it goes one stating the following
what do I think? I think the idea of petent is a selfish act. And every selfish act should be discouraged. So yeah... I dont like patents... Only way to truly own anything is to give it away. But enough of my dogma... I just hope nintendo would revitalize the industry... One can hope... right? ^^;;
------ http://timothylive.net
Can you patent plot elements in books?
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I saw that on slashdot last week with 'A Gamers' Manifesto'
From the essay:You can't patent general ideas. Someone might be able to patent a specific implementation of a fighting game, or the software to render the fighters quickly. They couldn't patent 2 guys fighting in a game.
As far as team games, we're getting close to being screwed already. I think EA has exclusive rights to the NFL next year. That means if you want to play as the World Champion New England Patriots, you will only be doing it in an NFL game. That is terrible since ESPN NFL2K5 was better than Madden to me. Now we will have ESPN Football2K6 with fake teams. Half of the fun is being your team with your players.
/. ++
No, you'll just have one company making 50 incarnations of the same goddamn game, and no motivation to change that.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
That patent can probably be killed with prior art. The Commodore 64 had "Mix-E-Load" during loading of the cassette version of Thalamus' Delta in 1987. This had music playing and would let you mess with the tracks, changing the bass line, drum beat, etc. and letting you mix your own music.
A year later, in 1988, the Mastertronic game Kane 2 had a Space Invaders game (called Invade-A-Load) that you played while the main game was loading. Again, this was on the cassette version.
These can be played by downloading the relevant .TAP files and loading them into an emulator such as x64.
Anyway, back on-topic, most of the classic games in existence would not be with us had game companies been patenting stuff like these mutants are suggesting.
Lets face it - Patent holders, as technical intellectual property creators, have been falling behind the protections afforded to their artistic bretheren! Copyright holders now have an entire century to reap the benfits, adn for their offspring to reap the benefits, of their labors. It seems wholely unfair to limit patents to such short terms as 14 years (20 for non-design).
I believe patents should be perpetual. Once you create it it should be your forever! And you children and your childrens children. We have seen my the slow - nay, slowing pace (based on patents per dollar spent on healthcare)- of patent applications and inventions in the 20th century that patent protection does not provide the needed impetus for our truly creative technical experts to advance the sciences.
There are numerous cases of inventors who could have changed the world, but insted of licencing their technology, compaies just waited until the patents ran out, and the used those iventions with no compensation to the creative mind whatsoever.
This must stop. We all must rise up and demand perpetual patents now.
(aren't you glad there isn't a _really_ organized lobby for patent holders like there is for performance artists?)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
But this "patent everything" is getting out of hand, and guess who will be the one to suffer? The patient applicants. Why? I'll tell you why: Because of all the stupid patents claims, people will lose respect for the patent process. Just wait until some random country (Ch*cough*ina) has the engineering knowledge to duplicate whatever patent they want, do they think they will think twice, especially since they can just shrug off any arguments, by pointing at those stupid patents? I think not.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
kangaroo (1982)
i,robot (1983)
5 years (hard drivin', 1988)
Will this be the real end of innovation in videogames?
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.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
what was the first arcade game to feature a "punch" button?
Double Dragon.
How about the first solid-object polygon game?
Um... Double Dragon!
How many years before the 2nd one?
Double Dragon?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
The TV and Movie industries are desperate to get the 12 to 24 year old males back in front of their crap. Killing game innovation could be just the ticket.
>Will this be the real end of innovation in videogames?
Well, for that to happen there should be some innovation to start with. Paradoxically, software patent could actually enforce some goddamn innovation in games, by preventing game developers from ripping each other off continuosly and rehashing the same stuff over and over again.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
And for a cancer detection firm in Utah, it ahs paid off. They "patented" a gene sequence which tests for the likelihood of breast cancer (I think). Note that they didn't patent the test process, but the information in the gene. Now, no matter what process you use to determine the condition of the gene, you cannot use it for cancer detection wihtout paying a $10k fee to that company. They "own" the exclusive right to the "data". Sort of like patenting moon-dogs as a predictor of coming precipitation, or the presence of a high pressure as a predicter of clear weather. They're natural facts, observable by anyone with the proper instuments. But they're patentable now. (iirc, Canada got into trouble over the cancer detection thing).
**note: this is all from memory of a (single?) online news story quite some time ago, the facts may be significantly different that I have implied**
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yes, but that's not the sort of thing that gets patented. I've done this before, so I know a bit about it:
...in a 3D world ...with some elements that move and others that are static ...where some of the moving elements are controlled by players connected
...where one of the guns is a railgun that uses said supply of ammunition at a fixed rate as long as said player continues to depress the fire button.
A patent application is usually done as a series of claims from most general to most specific. Let's take Doom as an example. The claims might be:
#1. We invented interactive entertainment.
#2.
#3.
#4.
[snip]
#99.
This is done with the expectation that the patent examiner strikes most of the early claims and the hope that he allows as many of the later as possible.
Doom came out in 1995 IIRC. So, maybe Doom would have gotten a patent on 3D worlds where a player manipulates and maneuvers through said world, shooting other players.
To actually sell Doom, they would have to license Origin Systems' patent on Ultima Underworld where a player manipulates and maneuvers through a 3D world.
Both Id and Origin would have to license Sirius Software's 1979 patent on their Apple ][ game WayOut, where a player maneuvers through a 3D world.
Oh, and if *you* wanted to write a game, maybe just a "simple shooter" - bring out the lawyers because there's gonna be a hell of a lot of licenses to negotiate.
that give the lawyers I know acid indigestion. Not all lawyers are unthinking and avaricious like this. Most of the ones I know are pretty good at long term thinking and believe in property protection the old fashioned way, through due diligence in protecting your own IP and going after the copiers as they get caught, not trying to stifle the industry/sector in advance, which is what this would do.
This is just stupid hucksterism.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Yes, this is true. For more information (from the trouble Canada got into over this) see this site: http://www.cancer.ca/ccs/internet/standard/0,3182, 3172_61901275__langId-en,00.html
Yay for patents! Now that your health is dependent on licensing a patent, I think it's time for a social revolution.
Perhaps I will try to get a DNA sample from the CEO of that Utah company, and file for a patent on his specific gene sequence. If he can patent a gene sequence that has existed for 2 million years, then I should be able to patent one that has existed for less than 100...
Wouldn't it be funny to sue him for existing? "Hey, you're existence infringes on my patent! Either pay up or change your DNA!". :-)
This is not only a gross over-simplification, it's flat-out wrong. The "in-order processing" done by the PowerPC CPUs in the Xbox 360 and the Cell processor in the PS3 is simply that -- machine instructions are executed in the order that they are presented to the CPU. In other words, these processors don't do instruction reordering. What does this have to do with AI? Absolutely nothing, really. Sure, instruction reordering would probably improve the performance of unoptimized code -- but good compiler tools will do the instruction reordering at compile time and save the transistors on the chip for more useful things.
When I see drivel like this, I tend to tune out the rest of the message, because it's clear the messenger doesn't know what he's talking about.
Having said that, the author of this manifesto probably has a valid point about the patent issues, though. I would have liked some more citations to back up these claims. Just because someone says these things are true doesn't mean they are. Lots of misinformation gets repeated ad nauseum until people believe it's true, when it really isn't. (Remember the old chestnut about video game consoles being sold at a loss? The truth is, few consoles have been sold at a loss. Of the few that started out being sold at a loss, most became profitable as the economics of mass production came into play. I believe the Xbox is the only current-generation console that's still losing money. The last PS2 redesign made Sony's system ultra-cheap to produce.)
Oh, here's another gem from this "manifesto":Ah, yes, load times in PC games are only the result of copy protection! How silly of me to think that it should actually take time for a non-trivial amount of data to be moved from a hard disk into system memory... I mean, seriously, this manifesto was written by someone with near-zero understanding of how hardware actually works, how computers work.
Cripes, I need a toothbrush for my eyeballs...
I'm proud that there is "a relative dearth of patent applications for the video game industry, especially considering how technology-dependent the video game industry is, and given its size in terms of annual sales."
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