Your argument seems to be that patent lawsuits can be much larger damages and that they can be much farther reaching.
No argument on the fact that patents are farther-reaching. I'll go so far as to say that I think software patents are always bad.
As far as damages, yes patents can have massive damages, like the $500 mil MS is fighting. But also remember mp3.com which paid about $100 million to settle its copyright infringement cases. Most patent lawsuits are under that amount, so it's not impossible to have copyright violations rival the patent costs in a lawsuit.
How do you figure? The only way to invalidate a patent is by getting sued for infringing it, so I would say the system is designed to allow that as an outcome. On the other hand, there is no way to invalidate a copyright.
Your only defense is in either trying to argue that they don't own the material in question (which you can also argue in a patent defense), or that you didn't infringe it enough to be worthwhile (which you can also argue in a patent defense).
So it seems to me like patents have an extra way of avoiding punishment than copyrights. Plus patents are a judgement call, and as such the court case is much less cut and dry.
Think about how few copyright cases go to trial and how many end in a settlement (i.e. the RIAA enforcement) and it seems to me like copyright is much easier to enforce then patents are.
As far as the argument about big companies holding up the case in massive paperwork, that could happen on ANY type of case, copyright or patent or anything else.
How can you claim that patents are not harder to get than copyright? Your post, mine too, are both protected by copyright. Neither of us did ANYTHING to accomplish that. TO get a patent you have to hire a patent lawyer to help write it, pay the filing fee, and it frequently takes multiple submissions to get accepted (if it gets accepted). Then about 3 years later, poof you have a patent!
Don't exaggerate by claiming patents are as easy to get as copyright. It's entirely false.
Now as someone who works in the game industry, how exactly would patents protect games? If anything, strong patent enforcement would shut down the game industry given the patents owned by the graphics companies, not help it.
You are aware that Valve pays to run the master server for Half Life, right? If they go under, you won't see any games listed anymore, even on Half Life 1.
Getting your game into stores is not a matter of calling them and telling them it's available. You have to have contacts at the companies (called "buyers", as in "I have a meeting with the buyer for Best Buy"), you have to sell them on why they should even bother to stock it (usually preorders determine the amount they stock, and that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem when you're looking to find places to sell it), and you have to know their buying schedule (Best Buy buys new products 4 times a year, and if you miss that you have to wait until the next one to try to convince them to buy a batch). Plus anyone who has worked with Wal Mart knows that they call the shots and they will ask for a censored version of your game if it is too violent/adult/etc. You are absolutely, positively at the mercy of Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal Mart, EB, Gamestop, Fry's, etc.
I worked on a game called Savage, where we created our own publisher for it, and still contracted out to Tri Synergy to handle getting the boxes into stores. We had a lot of people who couldn't find the game at stores, precisely because we didn't have a bigger publisher who could convince the stores that they needed to have more than a couple copies at each store. Again, it's a chicken and egg thing. Almost regardless of the quality of your game, if you can convince the stores to buy LOTS of copies and put up big displays, you'll have big sales. If you remember on Savage, we did a deal to get into the beta if you pre-ordered the game. This wasn't some money-grubbing thing, it was because we were desperate to get the game into stores and we needed pre-orders to show them that some Indy developer had something worth selling.
Finally, my mom isn't going to go on Steam and buy Half Life 2 Silver for a family member as a Christmas gift. She's going to want a box to give. Holiday sales make up 60% of game sales for the year.
Valve stands to make some nice cash off their sales over Steam, but don't kid yourself and think they'll get even 10% of the total sales on there. They need a publisher more than you can imagine.
*obvious note: my statements are my own and do not reflect the views of either S2 Games or Activision
You should check out another site that is very similar. tiles.ice.org (there was a/. story about it a couple years back but unsurprisingly it ground the server into little bits - time to give it another shot!).
s/allows the *freedom* consumers want/plays GTA4 first/
You think the general public cares about freedom? How 1998 of you:)
The console that wins will be the console with the best games. People buy a console to play a game - you bought your NES to play Mario, Gameboy to play Tetris on the bus, PS2 to play GTA3, etc. The general public could give a crap about openness or freedom on their console.
After we shipped Savage, I stuck around and worked on major parts of the 2.0 patch, and then left to come work for Namco. I'm now working on a console game at Namco, and it's great (S2 was great, and so is Namco).
No, Savage is completely separate from NS. Savage was already under development when NS was announced. If you want to really look for prior art, you should look at Allegiance or some of the others that predate Allegiance.
There are no keygens for Savage, because when I generated the CD Keys for it I did not do it algorithmically. All of the valid keys are kept on the server, which is where the cd key check happens (not locally).
The upcoming 2.0 patch for Savage will make it a lot less RAM-hungry. The reason a TNT2 can't play Savage well is because it doesn't have hardware transform and lighting, so all the vertexes have to be handled by the CPU. Big outdoor engines like the one in Savage push a lot of polygons, so that's a severe CPU hit.
Jon (Slothy) (aka the guy who ported Savage to Linux)
If this is legit, this all applies. If not, then obviously it's not worth anyone's time to debate.
Valve will not lose any licenses due to the code being available. Nobody is going to not license the engine because they can get the source. You'd get your ass sued to oblivion to commit largescale copyright infringement on a major retail product. The first thing anyone asks when you're working on a game is "what engine are you using?". You can't hide your engine - knowledable people can easily tell what engine it is by running it.
The real risk is cheating, which could very well have a real impact on sales (why buy HL2 to play the new CS when the new CS has at least as many cheats as the old one?). Plus if cheating is rampant, it could scare away licensees.
So they could lose real sales and licensees, but only because of cheating, not because they don't need to pay for the source because they can get it for free:)
By "they still haven't released a complete specification for the file format, or the audio format", I assume you meant, "Back when Vorbis hit 1.0, I read the full specification and stopped spreading FUD", right?
The problem is that ansis nowadays exist as gif and png's. Sending lots of people to all try to download 200k files off some smaller-bandwidth server is suicide.
But with that in mind, www.ice.org has all of the iCE Packs online, and even some pre-pack ansis (since iCE began in 1990 but groups didn't start releasing packs until around 08/1992). You can search for art there, but only among the iCE work. ACiD still has a website, but that seems to be down now. But their artpacks site is still online, with lots of old packs (not viewable on the web, so you'll need an ansi viewer) at here.
There is a more comprehensive web-viewable ansi archive of almost every major pack ever released, but it appears to be down right now. Check www.idledreams.net sometime in the future to see if it's come back online I guess, that's probably what you want.
Just as a warning, I'm a game developer. Short version: if you're just looking to play music, no, you don't need a hardcore gamer's sound card.
But for those of you who are gamers, the Live! is out of date. The 3d sound support of the Live! is pretty poor, and although I haven't seen hard developer specs yet, it looks like they fixed a lot of it with the Audigy. I wish I could get some good hard specs on what EAX 3.0 is bringing us though.
First, the Live! doesn't support any sort of sound reflection. It doesn't accept geometry to let it calculate the echos and reflections, etc. The Aureal cards did this years ago, and finally Creative is catching up. Additionally, with the Live you get global EAX support, meaning you say "the world has a reverb of X and an echo of Y". The Audigy lets you do it per source, so you can have a reverb on one object, an echo on another, etc.
Essentially, the Live just does some cheap mixing of sounds using 3d distance to calculate volume. Then it passes the mixed sound through their DSP to add in effects. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I've found doing all the sound code for our game engine. From what I can tell, the Audigy does real 3d sound calculations using geometry that you give the card and has a more flexible dsp.
This definitely will make 3d games more immersive. Small hallways will get a closed in sound with reflections, ideally you could have echos if you were in a valley in an outdoor engine, etc. Of course how well this works remains to be seen, but the capability is there.
Hi there vbrtrmn, I'm the tiles.ice.org admin/author. Heh, no, I'm not saddened. The server is still chugging along. QUITE a few of the folks reading slashdot have gotten to the quilts, they just haven't bothered to set up mirrors for everyone else. I apologize to everyone for not having enough bandwidth for this (sending 400k - 1.5megs to tens of thousands of people on a partial T1 is a bad business plan), and I apologize for not handling a failed db connection more gracefully earlier. The code is GPL'd, they could have sent a patch instead of whining:)
Hopefully once the bandwidth frees up a bit, I can put it back to the regular site. Until then, maybe you can convince the others to share.
Actually, although Virginia was the first to pass it, it doesn't go into effect until July of this year. Maryland passed it with no qualifications, so it is in effect in Maryland right now (AFAIK).
Plus when I contacted my state senator to oppose it awhile ago, my state senator told me essentially that "it must be a good law, they spent many years working on it" (NOTE: paraphrased with a heavy slant from me:). So Virginians don't need to worry about UCITA!:)
What a kneejerk reaction. Although I know that RedHat isn't a fan of QT, this couldn't be an attempt to destroy QT at all. RedHat supports Gnome, which means that it must support GTK+, if not only for application consistancy (a key design goal of Gnome).
But even aside from that, if you read the Inti docs, it also clearly states that the Gtk+ wrapper is only one part, and that Inti could work with other toolkits (gee... I don't think they're talking about Motif).
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument seems to be that patent lawsuits can be much larger damages and that they can be much farther reaching.
No argument on the fact that patents are farther-reaching. I'll go so far as to say that I think software patents are always bad.
As far as damages, yes patents can have massive damages, like the $500 mil MS is fighting. But also remember mp3.com which paid about $100 million to settle its copyright infringement cases. Most patent lawsuits are under that amount, so it's not impossible to have copyright violations rival the patent costs in a lawsuit.
How do you figure? The only way to invalidate a patent is by getting sued for infringing it, so I would say the system is designed to allow that as an outcome. On the other hand, there is no way to invalidate a copyright.
Your only defense is in either trying to argue that they don't own the material in question (which you can also argue in a patent defense), or that you didn't infringe it enough to be worthwhile (which you can also argue in a patent defense).
So it seems to me like patents have an extra way of avoiding punishment than copyrights. Plus patents are a judgement call, and as such the court case is much less cut and dry.
Think about how few copyright cases go to trial and how many end in a settlement (i.e. the RIAA enforcement) and it seems to me like copyright is much easier to enforce then patents are.
As far as the argument about big companies holding up the case in massive paperwork, that could happen on ANY type of case, copyright or patent or anything else.
How can you claim that patents are not harder to get than copyright? Your post, mine too, are both protected by copyright. Neither of us did ANYTHING to accomplish that. TO get a patent you have to hire a patent lawyer to help write it, pay the filing fee, and it frequently takes multiple submissions to get accepted (if it gets accepted). Then about 3 years later, poof you have a patent!
Don't exaggerate by claiming patents are as easy to get as copyright. It's entirely false.
Now as someone who works in the game industry, how exactly would patents protect games? If anything, strong patent enforcement would shut down the game industry given the patents owned by the graphics companies, not help it.
You are aware that Valve pays to run the master server for Half Life, right? If they go under, you won't see any games listed anymore, even on Half Life 1.
Did you buy the game and disagree with the EULA, or are you just bitching about a hypothetical?
Thanks man, I'm glad you enjoyed it! The Savage community was possibly the greatest gaming community in the world, so thank YOU! :)
Getting your game into stores is not a matter of calling them and telling them it's available. You have to have contacts at the companies (called "buyers", as in "I have a meeting with the buyer for Best Buy"), you have to sell them on why they should even bother to stock it (usually preorders determine the amount they stock, and that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem when you're looking to find places to sell it), and you have to know their buying schedule (Best Buy buys new products 4 times a year, and if you miss that you have to wait until the next one to try to convince them to buy a batch). Plus anyone who has worked with Wal Mart knows that they call the shots and they will ask for a censored version of your game if it is too violent/adult/etc. You are absolutely, positively at the mercy of Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal Mart, EB, Gamestop, Fry's, etc.
I worked on a game called Savage, where we created our own publisher for it, and still contracted out to Tri Synergy to handle getting the boxes into stores. We had a lot of people who couldn't find the game at stores, precisely because we didn't have a bigger publisher who could convince the stores that they needed to have more than a couple copies at each store. Again, it's a chicken and egg thing. Almost regardless of the quality of your game, if you can convince the stores to buy LOTS of copies and put up big displays, you'll have big sales. If you remember on Savage, we did a deal to get into the beta if you pre-ordered the game. This wasn't some money-grubbing thing, it was because we were desperate to get the game into stores and we needed pre-orders to show them that some Indy developer had something worth selling.
Finally, my mom isn't going to go on Steam and buy Half Life 2 Silver for a family member as a Christmas gift. She's going to want a box to give. Holiday sales make up 60% of game sales for the year.
Valve stands to make some nice cash off their sales over Steam, but don't kid yourself and think they'll get even 10% of the total sales on there. They need a publisher more than you can imagine.
*obvious note: my statements are my own and do not reflect the views of either S2 Games or Activision
But you would enter a CD Key and allow it to authorize that?
Doh.
:)
I guess working for Activision makes me read things
Except Activision isn't publishing Half Life 2. Vivendi is.
Hey Jason :)
You should check out another site that is very similar. tiles.ice.org (there was a /. story about it a couple years back but unsurprisingly it ground the server into little bits - time to give it another shot!).
The Tribute to Salvador Dali, Tribute to Van Gogh, and Tribute to M.C. Escher came out particularly well.
(disclaimer: I created the website, but that shouldn't take away from the art that others have done on it)
Run it on the goatse guy! If the results are positive I can finally start sleeping again.
s/allows the *freedom* consumers want/plays GTA4 first/
:)
You think the general public cares about freedom? How 1998 of you
The console that wins will be the console with the best games. People buy a console to play a game - you bought your NES to play Mario, Gameboy to play Tetris on the bus, PS2 to play GTA3, etc. The general public could give a crap about openness or freedom on their console.
Jon/Slothy
(Game Programmer)
After we shipped Savage, I stuck around and worked on major parts of the 2.0 patch, and then left to come work for Namco. I'm now working on a console game at Namco, and it's great (S2 was great, and so is Namco).
Jon (Slothy)
No, Savage is completely separate from NS. Savage was already under development when NS was announced. If you want to really look for prior art, you should look at Allegiance or some of the others that predate Allegiance.
Jon (Slothy)
Ex-employee, S2 Games
There are no keygens for Savage, because when I generated the CD Keys for it I did not do it algorithmically. All of the valid keys are kept on the server, which is where the cd key check happens (not locally).
Jon (Slothy)
Ex-employee, S2 Games
The upcoming 2.0 patch for Savage will make it a lot less RAM-hungry. The reason a TNT2 can't play Savage well is because it doesn't have hardware transform and lighting, so all the vertexes have to be handled by the CPU. Big outdoor engines like the one in Savage push a lot of polygons, so that's a severe CPU hit.
Jon (Slothy)
(aka the guy who ported Savage to Linux)
If this is legit, this all applies. If not, then obviously it's not worth anyone's time to debate.
:)
Valve will not lose any licenses due to the code being available. Nobody is going to not license the engine because they can get the source. You'd get your ass sued to oblivion to commit largescale copyright infringement on a major retail product. The first thing anyone asks when you're working on a game is "what engine are you using?". You can't hide your engine - knowledable people can easily tell what engine it is by running it.
The real risk is cheating, which could very well have a real impact on sales (why buy HL2 to play the new CS when the new CS has at least as many cheats as the old one?). Plus if cheating is rampant, it could scare away licensees.
So they could lose real sales and licensees, but only because of cheating, not because they don't need to pay for the source because they can get it for free
Jon (Slothy)
Programmer, S2 Games
By "they still haven't released a complete specification for the file format, or the audio format", I assume you meant, "Back when Vorbis hit 1.0, I read the full specification and stopped spreading FUD", right?
The problem is that ansis nowadays exist as gif and png's. Sending lots of people to all try to download 200k files off some smaller-bandwidth server is suicide.
But with that in mind, www.ice.org has all of the iCE Packs online, and even some pre-pack ansis (since iCE began in 1990 but groups didn't start releasing packs until around 08/1992). You can search for art there, but only among the iCE work. ACiD still has a website, but that seems to be down now. But their artpacks site is still online, with lots of old packs (not viewable on the web, so you'll need an ansi viewer) at here.
There is a more comprehensive web-viewable ansi archive of almost every major pack ever released, but it appears to be down right now. Check www.idledreams.net sometime in the future to see if it's come back online I guess, that's probably what you want.
Slothy
(disclaimer: I help run iCE)
Just as a warning, I'm a game developer. Short version: if you're just looking to play music, no, you don't need a hardcore gamer's sound card.
But for those of you who are gamers, the Live! is out of date. The 3d sound support of the Live! is pretty poor, and although I haven't seen hard developer specs yet, it looks like they fixed a lot of it with the Audigy. I wish I could get some good hard specs on what EAX 3.0 is bringing us though.
First, the Live! doesn't support any sort of sound reflection. It doesn't accept geometry to let it calculate the echos and reflections, etc. The Aureal cards did this years ago, and finally Creative is catching up. Additionally, with the Live you get global EAX support, meaning you say "the world has a reverb of X and an echo of Y". The Audigy lets you do it per source, so you can have a reverb on one object, an echo on another, etc.
Essentially, the Live just does some cheap mixing of sounds using 3d distance to calculate volume. Then it passes the mixed sound through their DSP to add in effects. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I've found doing all the sound code for our game engine. From what I can tell, the Audigy does real 3d sound calculations using geometry that you give the card and has a more flexible dsp.
This definitely will make 3d games more immersive. Small hallways will get a closed in sound with reflections, ideally you could have echos if you were in a valley in an outdoor engine, etc. Of course how well this works remains to be seen, but the capability is there.
Hi there vbrtrmn, I'm the tiles.ice.org admin/author. Heh, no, I'm not saddened. The server is still chugging along. QUITE a few of the folks reading slashdot have gotten to the quilts, they just haven't bothered to set up mirrors for everyone else. I apologize to everyone for not having enough bandwidth for this (sending 400k - 1.5megs to tens of thousands of people on a partial T1 is a bad business plan), and I apologize for not handling a failed db connection more gracefully earlier. The code is GPL'd, they could have sent a patch instead of whining :)
Hopefully once the bandwidth frees up a bit, I can put it back to the regular site. Until then, maybe you can convince the others to share.
Jon/Slothy
Actually, although Virginia was the first to pass it, it doesn't go into effect until July of this year. Maryland passed it with no qualifications, so it is in effect in Maryland right now (AFAIK).
:). So Virginians don't need to worry about UCITA! :)
Plus when I contacted my state senator to oppose it awhile ago, my state senator told me essentially that "it must be a good law, they spent many years working on it" (NOTE: paraphrased with a heavy slant from me
What a kneejerk reaction. Although I know that RedHat isn't a fan of QT, this couldn't be an attempt to destroy QT at all. RedHat supports Gnome, which means that it must support GTK+, if not only for application consistancy (a key design goal of Gnome).
But even aside from that, if you read the Inti docs, it also clearly states that the Gtk+ wrapper is only one part, and that Inti could work with other toolkits (gee... I don't think they're talking about Motif).