Slashdot Mirror
Patent Troll Claims Minecraft Infringement
First time accepted submitter ubrgeek writes "Popular game Minecraft has hit the big time: It's being sued for infringement by patent troll Uniloc who claims the game infringes a patent it holds on copy protection software. Developer Markus 'Notch' Persson sounds like he's up for the challenge: 'Unfortunately for them, they're suing us over a software patent. If needed, I will throw piles of money at making sure they don't get a cent.'"
Enough of this crap. Patent and copyright trolling needs to end now!
Good to see that someone truly understands the prisoner's dillemma. On the whole in society, it's best to always choose what's best for everyone and not best for you, but if you come across a group like this, it makes perfect sense to single them out and punish them. I really wish more corporates, companies and people did this. It would really help to diminish the amount of successful selfish people in the world.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Honestly it would be cheaper to just put a hit on the guy doing all the lawsuits.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Good to see that someone truly understands the prisoner's dillemma.
Life is not prisoner's dilemma. It's iterated prisoner's dilemma because people can actually build up reputations. It's been shown that the best stable strategy is tit-for-tat plus forgiveness.
in the initial round it is best to be the nice guy, after that just mirror what the other side has done to you. Of course this assumes a closed system with an unlimited number of interactions.
So in this case one party is being negative to another and has a reputation for always doing so. The appropriate thing for Notch to do is to be as ruthless as possible within legal restrictions. It is unlikely the patent troll will have a second round with you, and will never not take the negative option. Therefore it is best to take them for all they are worth, if you can.
Amazing how common sense and game theory comes to the same conclusions given the same input.
The problem with that suggestion is this: Depending on the company even if you win...you'll lose.
I had a friend that was running a little ISP that was basically railroaded by one of the bigger carriers. It was obviously an antitrust slam dunk, not to mention they had ignored the contracts they had signed as well as making sure nobody else would deal with his little company. So why isn't my friend sitting on a beach enjoying his victory? Because his lawyer said "Oh there isn't a doubt in my mind you'll win, none at all, but it'll cost you a good million and a half and 10 years of your life to get to the end" so needless to say since my friend didn't have a million and a half nor 10 years of his life he wished to through away in court he walked away.
Look at how long it took to finally end the SCO mess, and that case was so damned obvious Ray Charles could have seen that SCO was full of shit. The reason that many settle is that unless you have nothing better to do with years of your life, not to mention great piles of money to piss away, its simply smarter to make it go away.
Think about it, this guy is just a little developer....how many more games is he NOT gonna put out and NOT gonna get the money from, because he's too tied up in court bullshit to be working on games? Now do i think that is right? Fuck no, I think the system stinks. But what the system IS and what it OUGHT to be are sadly two different things and as it is this guy will in all likelihood lose a ton of money he'll never see again even if he wins. Lets face it friend, if they lose they'll just fold and start up a new firm doing the same shit tomorrow while this guy won't see a cent.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I disagree due to the fact that people can reverse engineer almost anything, making most trade secrets useless. If someone figures out your trade secret, you're hooped, that's all. If you have a patent though, even if someone else doesn't know about it and comes up with their implementation on their own, you still get to sue them. The patent lottery continues.
Have you read a recent patent? It's a joke. Deliberately unreadably-lawyeresque writing style, extremely vague so that they can sue anybody who implements anything even remotely similar (ie. patenting an idea, which is something you're specifically NOT supposed to be able to do), and becoming frequently more and more obvious within the realm the cover. Slip your patent in, then sue anybody who becomes profitable using a similar idea in a product. If you're lucky, they'll setting for millions and you won't even have to go to court.
Fuck this broken system. It's been gamed to death by filthy, parasitic scum. I seriously hope these patent trolls get crushed hard. I doubt it though. The system is so bought off and corrupt, real justice is as rare as rocking-horse shit.
No, they aren't. Corporations are legal constructs made of legal fiction. They may or may not have legal relationships - such as ownership or employment - to people, but they are not made of people.
And nobody's suggested taking their rights away. But tell me: if I draw a cartoon, do the characters in that cartoon have legal rights? Do I get in trouble if I draw a piano falling on them? No? Then why should any other fictitious construct - such as a corporation - have them?
By your logic, Pythagora's Theorem is a person.
So how do you propose throwing a corporation behind bars? The worst you can do to a corporation is give it a (usually ridiculously small) fine, and even then we get a chorus of people bitterly explaining how it'll simply pass it on to the customers (not that that's relevant for a patent troll or other nonproductive parasites).
A fictitious entity cannot be held responsible for anything because it does not exist, thus it shouldn't have rights either.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.