'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'
(www.pcgamer.com)
from bytesonbike@discuss.online to games@lemmy.world on 11 Sep 23:44
https://discuss.online/post/26873218
from bytesonbike@discuss.online to games@lemmy.world on 11 Sep 23:44
https://discuss.online/post/26873218
According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn’t just a moment of questionable legal theory. It’s an indictment of American patent law.
“Broadly, I don’t disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents,” said Sigmon, whose opinions do not represent those of his firm and clients. “They have been an embarrassing failure of the US patent system.”
threaded - newest
This is why I can't support Nintendo.
death to intellectual property
*for digital content
nah, death to all intellectual property. it’s not better when it’s physical. in fact, in some cases, it’s much much worse; like with medicine patents
Patents are not intellectual property and they are regulated by the patent office. Intellectual property is not regulated and cannot be blanket dismissed.
We just need someone competent on patent offices
How are patents not intellectual property?
Patents are made on concepts. IPs are made on the complete production.
That doesn’t seem to be true. Patents are listed foremost among types of IP in multiple sources.
And nintendo.
I can’t wait to play Elden Ring 2 when it’s made by Nintendo because Elden Ring used summoning and now only runs at 12 fps.
Nintendo also owns the rights to platformers, racing games, and rpgs. Tough luck, that's just how it is.
NPC dialogs? Owned by Nintendo too.
Hey listen!
Did you pay for that parent use?
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/e9883684-556f-480e-9804-84d2d313b026.gif">
Don’t forget alarm clocks
Or ‘love hotels’. You want to rent a room by the hour, Mario gets his cut.
If it was made by Nintendo (not Gamefreak) it would actually be optimized
If by optimized you mean removing most details and adding a cartoon filter over it.
<img alt="" src="https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/4b840016-edd6-4107-9699-c882d0be1061.jpeg">
Vs
<img alt="" src="https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/516ec639-0810-4fda-b92e-572bc9286fae.jpeg">
Terrible legal practices aside.
Nintendo deserves a lot of shit for their business decisions, but not for their art directions. windwaker and sunshine still look good to this day by simply appling higher resolutions and some anti aliasing. No game with “realistic graphics” has ever stood the test of time.
Hahahahahahaha
Which ones still look good a decade later.
Shadow of the Colossus is what 20 years old? It’s pretty much as realistic as the PS2 could handle and still looks decent.
You can’t use logic here, it’s a waste of time. They already made up their minds and even assigned a maliciously litigious multibillion dollar corporation to their internal identity.
The best response is to point and laugh.
the fuck is wrong with you
I’m fully stopped. Now what?
Hammer time
The time for “collaborate and listen” has passed. Now, the time for Nintendo to bring down hammer go hammer mc hammer yo hammer and the rest can go and play has arrived.
An embarrassing failure describes the US quite well actually. Also fuck Nintendo. Don’t give them your money.
The USPTO is notorious for granting insane patents knowing they are invalid or too vague and expect the court system to be the final arbiter. It’s almost as if they like stirring shit up for there own amusement.
I’d wager these video game illiterates look at 1 thing: do they recognize the name of the company?
If the answer to that is ‘yes,’ then they will give that company whatever they want. If the answer is ‘no,’ then you’re fucked.
Copyright and patent laws need to die.
Anyone who doesn’t understand this is a useful idiot.
Current system is obviously broken, but you don’t believe that artists and creators should have a right to control their intellectual property at all?
And yes, intellectual property is real whether you want it to be or not. And it’s not necessarily about money, but about controlling what can be done with your work.
For example, Bruce Springsteen should 100% be allowed to tell Trump to fuck off and stop using his music at rallys.
What would be the mechanism to do that without IP?
It’s imaginary property. It’s not real and only exists in our heads. Saying someone stole your “intellectual property” is akin to saying they “stole your idea.”
It is about the money, as well. Nobody should be able to own an idea.
Bruce Springsteen will just have to grow up and get over it.
So just no music business then?
No movies. No TV shows. No comics…
No art, no poetry, no video games. . .
IMO creators should have better protections - the current laws don’t seem to stop AI gobbling up their work. But at the same time this Nintendo thing is obviously bullshit. I’m surprised the court * allowed it. Probably a decision made by a very old Christian man who doesn’t understand what games are and can’t use a smartphone.
* Oops decision was made by patent office who really should know better
Yeah it’s clearly broken. But there is a complete lack of nuance in these “get rid of IP and copyright completely (and if you disagree you’re an idiot)” arguments. They’re just supremely unhelpful.
Yep I’m right there with you. Artists of all types should be entitled to the proceeds of their work. Also, if I were creative and something I’d created was plagiarised, I’d be unhappy about that too. Just because a big company abuses a system doesn’t mean it shouldn’t protect individuals.
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Pretty neat how capitalists invented art and it isn’t at all an intrinsic part of the human experience since at least 40,000 years ago.
They certainly patented it.
My point is that people make stuff even without a profit incentive.
It may surprise you to know that people produced music before IP laws existed.
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Where did I say that it did?
I’m just trying to picture what this world would actually look like, and it seems shit.
People will still create music, but without having any sense of ownership over it whatsoever, there is zero incentive to distribute it.
Whether you believe in private property or not doesn’t change the fact that artists will always feel a sense of ownership over their creations
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Why are you people always so fucking rude when you’re shit is challenged in any way?
Look at my other comments in this thread if you care to actually understand my position. I never even suggested that people would stop making music.
I even said that it could maybe work if we weren’t in an ultra capitalist society. But we are, so completely getting rid of the concept of IP is a bad idea.
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Reported for personal attacks. Do you have an actual argument for your claim or will you just be resorting to ad hominem?
I do believe that.
Intellectual property leads to all kind of unfairness. It should be normalized that artist would be paid for the work done, nor for property ownership.
This adds to some other believes about people shouldn’t be paid just for “property ownership”.
And once the art is done and released is part of human race, that does include terrible human beings, but it also includes absolutely everyone else.
Some other argument for this… For instance, being an artist is one of the jobs with biggest pay disparity, from the poorest of them all to some of the richest. That’s a normal output of basing income on property ownership, things snowball once you have enough property.
I don’t think there’s a way to make private property (physical or intelectual) work in a fair economy. And remember, private property is not the same as personal property, just in case.
I do think the world of art would get much better and more diverse if we got rid of property as a way to measure revenue and put work in the center as a way to measure how much we should pay each artist.
You live in a dream world. Why would I release my music to the public when there are people who will make a living stealing it, putting their name on it, and selling 1000x more than I ever could because they already have name recognition? And those people WILL exist for every form of creative content.
Artists need some sort of mechanism to protect them from exploitation that is inherent to capitalism
Because you will be paid for it?
In the current world I could torrent your music and you’ll be “losing money” and will end up investing more work in anti-piracy and advertisement than in making good music.
If instead you would be paid for the making of the music regardless of how many copies of a digital file you sold by a better system that’s not based on private property and the means of capitalism, it would mean that you could 100% focus on making music and everyone could enjoy the things you made. You couldn’t care less if I torrent your music in this new world. Hell, music would probably be mainly distributed by torrenting.
Everyone will be happy, except investors and people thriving of this inefficient and unfair system.
Meanwhile, I’ll be seeding.
And how would that system decide how much you get paid and where would the money for that payment come from? How do you make sure a carefully crafted piece of music, that brings happiness to millions of people gets paid fairly compared to someone just putting together a song in 5 minutes by pressing random notes on the keyboard?
Any system to evaluate compensation would be better than the actual one, which is a completely mess that does not properly compensate artists for their work.
Currently marketing, frontstore presence and market dominance is far more relevant on a particular artist income than their craft.
Any system that actually would think about what people think about a particular craft, how much time and effort got put into it, how much it was enjoyed, etc, would be better. Currently is just about who can make more sales and get more ad money, the art is secondary and I’m being generous.
What is “fair compensation”, in this case, for you? Does bringing joy to millions of people entitle you to more money or do you see the happiness you shared and subsequent fame as part of your “payment” - what you get out of it?
Ok but you’re literally describing a utopia. That is not a world that exists in reality.
So is a world without murder. That doesn’t mean that we should defend murderers doesn’t it?
A world where gay people had equal rights surely was an utopia on the year 1800s, look how far have we come. Thanks to people that though that a better word is, indeed, possible.
Why wouldn’t we strive for a better way of doing things? Why defend faulty systems that we know they are bad just because those are the systems currently in place?
I do believe we can be better.
And if not… Piracy it is.
Just because we could do better doesn’t magically make tearing all protections down a remotely intelligent idea.
They’re asking for a SPECIFIC idea of what to replace them with… because you dummies will just end up reinventing IP laws without 70 year copyrights… like they were originally…
This is a trains for public transit situation… You’ll whine all day about the status quo, say nothing good exists, want to tear it all down … and then just reinvent the same fucking thing we already have but just need a different mix of…
I think you are arguing against an imaginary group of people here.
Is he? Seems to me he is spot on. A lot of words about how things should be and precious little how to make it so.
Sure, you got to start somewhere but you also need a plan to get there in the first place.
All the personal attacks were completely out of place. So that person is out of the debate for me.
You were polite so I will answer to you.
First. Pay per access is no-go. Art is publicly release, pay or not pay access for things that are costless to copy is unrestricted. This already happens, piracy exist and cannot made go away. It’s just its legalization.
Second. Once pay per access is abolished. It’s more important to focus in pay for work or pay for release. Focusing more on making the artist a person who is being patronize for doing their art rather than a salesperson.
Once we have this idea of patronizing, instead of private labels we could focus more on cooperative labels, taking out investors and useless middlemen. People could paid for some artist or some label (which will be exclusively conformed by artist) in order for them to keep making their thing. Some labels could be actually public labels, this already exist to some degree when some state pays for art to be made, just expanding it.
Now that we changed the model in a model were people give their money before they get to see the final product we should put some protections in place to avoid scams and then we are golden.
It’s not so complicated really. Many systems already exist. The history is the same as with everything else capitalism and rich capitalists are in a dominant position so they make any change for the better harder.
Get rid of the requirement to pay for art in a capitalist society, and you destroy art.
Again, you brainless fools will argue all day just to reinvent what IP laws were originally supposed to be…
Can you stop insulting people you don’t agree with? Thanks. I’ll do myself a favor and just block you.
rofl your inability to face reality is hilarious.
One of the most popular artists in the world was all over the news last week because their art was destroyed by capitalists. What point where you trying to make?
You fools are asking to remove all protections for artists… How the fuck do you think that’s going to play out?
As long as the world still runs on capitalism, free art will ONLY mean destitute artists. The fact you fools cannot suss that out is straight up pathetic.
I’m literally talking about how we should try to do better. I’ve just been around long enough to know that this ain’t how you do it.
Yeah… victory belonging to the person with the widest reach and deepest pockets rather than the originator of the material/idea is one way to ensure that all creatives become paupers. This is one of those many on-paper ideas that, without the upheaval of pretty much every other established human social structure, would be awful in practice.
I thought you were going to say something about Spotify for a moment.
99+% of art is never sold. The vast majority of artist don’t make money. Who really cares about the extreme minority who use capitalism to control our culture. They don’t get to decide what the rest of the world does purely for their economic interests.
No they don’t need any mechanism. The arts and sciences existed for thousands of years without modern silly interpretations for commercial interests.
So for the artists that created works but did not sell them, you believe that they would be fine with someone else photocopying it and then selling it themselves?
Sorry I’m not a head in the clouds, utopian. I try to base my beliefs in plausible reality.
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Why are y’all so fucking rude?
I’m a bootlicker because I don’t think getting rid of the concept of intellectual property completely is a good idea.
Ok Bud
And you know nothing about me and whether or not I’m a musician or an artist, so you shouldn’t assume.
But I know for a fact that most artists would not be fucking ok with someone photocopying their work (that they didn’t sell) for profit.
I know this because it literally already fucking happens, and artists hate it.
You think every artist is a selfish asshole like you. That is just called projecting.
You are incapable of good faith discussion.
Hope you get help for your anger issues. Have a good weekend.
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It’s interesting how other people here seem to have no issue discussing this topic with me. I wonder if they’d call me a “capitalist bootlicker” or if they’ve actually been paying attention to what I said.
People need to be compensated for their work, that may end up being an awful lot and probably in excess of what they need, but that’s how it has to work. Any other system would just disincentivize people from putting in the effort, in fact it would force them not to because they would have to do something else in order to earn enough money to live. The precise opposite of your desired outcome would happen, the rich would produce endless amounts of content just to more money, and all the smaller artists would have to go and get a job in Costco or something.
The only way your idea would work is if we completely change the economic system and got rid of money. Which I’m all in favour of but I suspect is probably outside of the scope of copyright law.
I also believe all intellectual property laws shouldn’t exist, so patent, copyright, and trademark.
To answer your first question no.
Intellectual property is a societal construct and it is as real as racism is. Which isn’t saying much.
If an artist doesn’t want their music to be heard and possibly replicated, altered, or used in a way they don’t like then it is their responsibility to never release it. Only by hiding it can they keep the world from misusing it.
rofl pure stupidity
Whatever you say Motoass!
Insults and nothing else? Thanks for proving you’re nothing but a petulant child who does not understand the real world.
I just returned an insult, you are welcome dumbass.
Blocked for being someone not worth talking to.
Your inability to view your own shortcomings will be a hilarious continual failure for you. Congratulations on being one of far too many morons to walk this earth.
The thing that irks me the most is that everyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liberal or some shit. No matter how grounded and nuanced your take is.
Every leftist has their own, ultra specific orthodoxy, and they will always find something about yours that makes you “not a real leftist.”
Nothing new either, it’s happened countless times. It’s so self-sabotaging.
You have no take other than approving the purchase and sale of our culture controlled by corporations.
You say IP is for the little guy, the average federal copyright lawsuit cost a quarter of a million dollars to pursue.
You have no clue about remix culture which was destroyed by profiteers. Corporations control the majority of artist’s commercial music. Many artists don’t own their own work.
Corporations constantly steal IP. AI has shown us that they don’t respect the very laws they created.
The only person living in a dystopia and loving it is you. The abolishment of IP would cause an explosion of science and art like the world hasn’t seen since they created laws to prevent it.
Not the person you responded to, but how would a recording artist earn a living in that model? If their work can get scooped up by a mega corporation and sold for pennies on the dollar due to the massive existing resources, reach, and infrastructure available to the corporation, what protections would there be against that happening?
Artist that want to make money can preform or sell their work like they have always done. IP is about commercial interests like royalties and licensing. This has nothing to do with the actual promotion of arts and science. It is about control.
Most artist don’t do it to make money even. This confusion of expression and commercial interest is the crux of what we are dealing with.
There is no natural protection from someone copying, remixing, or reinventing your work. This is literally how art is made. No one creates in a vacuum and everyone is inspired by someone else.
There are already no protections for the little guy. Corporations borrow and use whatever they want. The IP system is NOT for the average person. It is designed to benefit and enrich an extreme minority and it does this well.
Unless someone who’s more famous than you decides to just steal it and put their name on it.
Oh well I guess. Back to the drawing board so it can happen again! Any day now, we’ll be a communist society with no need for money, so I’ll just keep putting out music to be stolen until then!
Corporations already do this everyday.
I know. That’s why we need better protections, not no protections. Do you get it yet?
Doing something to make money and making enough from doing it to keep doing it full-time are two very different things, and I would argue the latter would be more difficult, not less under your proposed system. Yes, corporations do that already because they can throw enough money at the case to wear down the plaintiff into settling. But how much more do you think they would steal if they didn’t even have to do that?
Why do most people lock their doors at night? Do they really think that a piece of metal stuck in a slab of wood would stop any thief who really wants to get in? No, of course not. But the amount of effort and risk required is enough of a deterrent that most thieves won’t bother.
Copyright law is similar in my eyes. Will it stop a huge corporation that is willing to dump huge sums of money into any one case? Not really. But the effort and money involved is enough to deter them in most cases. Remove that they have no incentive not to steal work. Find a catchy song? Get one of the thousands of artists on contract to re-produce it to a T, send it to your millions of online viewers, and rack up 100k views in 12 hours. Congrats, you beat the artist to their 15 minutes of fame and any chance they could get at exposure, their potential earnings are yours now and it hasn’t even been a day. Any future web searches for the song will show you as well, so the original artist will likely be very quickly lost to time, and everyone remembers that one track the Capitol Records conglomerate put out that one time. That’s the kind of stuff I envision happening with literally no safeguards.
Exercising copyright in a court of law is extremely expensive. $250k+ minimum for a federal case. It is not a system designed for the artists you are describing.
In fact, it is just the opposite with corporations going after small artists regularly, not the other way around.
How has copyright been a deterrent to AI? This is a great case example of the system working as it is intended. Benefiting corporations which is what the system is designed to do.
Most major recording artists do not own their works. Where is their protection? The system is once again not designed for the individual.
Copyright was designed to create artificial scarcity. It was created out of the guilds back in England and was designed to censor and control the printing industry NOT protect authors rights.
While I will admit copyright is the most palatable of the Intellectual Properties it is still extremely problematic and we would be better off without it.
Don’t even get me started on patents and trademarks and the abuse these system perpetrate on our society. There is no doubt the elimination of intellectual property would be beneficial to our society at the detriment of the rent-seeking capitalists.
If you want a capitalist society it needs to die.
If Trump can sell Springsteen’s music cheaper than Springsteen then that’s just the free market.
Exactly. And why would Springsteen have any incentive to distribute (or ultimately, even record maybe) any of his music in this proposed reality?
Not a fan of Springsteen, was just the first example that came to mind.
I’m just trying to imagine the incalculable amount of great music we would have been deprived of had we been living in a world without IP laws.
They might have written them, but we’d never get to hear it.
If we weren’t in an ultra capitalist society, it could maybe work and that would be wonderful. But we’re not, so just getting rid of IP entirely is just a bad idea.
Artists and creators already don’t control their intellectual property. The megacorporations do, and they have always violated the intellectual property rights of small artists with little to no consequences.
Intellectual property laws are a recent and catastrophic mistake. For the majority of the history of our species, no one could retain sole ownership of art. And it was better. We make the best art when we trade it back & forth and reiterate on it.
We should scrap intellectual property laws, and heavily tax corporate AI use to fund a national artists stipend to provide them a good standard of living.
Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.
If the internet actually enforced copyright to the letter of the law, it wouldnt exist in its current form. No memes, no game streamers or videogame youtubers, no unlicensed music, no image sharing. Copyright needs to be defended to the best of the holders ability otherwise they lose it. It would necessitate a constant stream of scanning and policing and litigation thatd be so taxing on platforms theyd just shut down. Video game streaming operates in a legal grey zone because the law is flawed.
Theres a reason programming tools are almost all open source. From languages to libraries to software, the alternative is just too inefficient.
Copyright is an old shitty system from the days when books required publishers who had to register an ISBN for everything they published. The modern equivalent would be if every unique copyrightable contribution on the internet first required submitting the media to a government agency to store a hash of it and issue a UUID.
I wouldnt say that IP doesnt exist, but once you share information with someone, they are now also a holder of that IP, just by the nature of reality.
Whose law? Whose enforcers? The Internet is fundamentally incompatible with traditional sovereignty and jurisdiction concepts
If the person who created it cannot profit from it, then nobody should be able to.
I think most artists would agree.
There should be a mechanism to reward artists for their work and enable them to keep creating, but without also allowing a system of vampires to control that mechanism and enslave them in a twisted web of dependency and power.
cough UBI cough
That’s what I was getting at, yes.
I genuinely believe it might not fix everything, but will go one hell of a long way to making a lot of things easier to fix.
Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.
Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.
Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.
Personally I don’t have an issue with individual intellectual property, it’s the acquisition and trade of it by corporations that I have an issue with. For example, I believe no copyright should last after the creator’s death. Disney is dead, Tolkien is dead, many musicians are dead, let alive creators contribute to their worlds.
That isn’t the problem.
Copyright law does run out after a while it’s not immediately upon the holders death but after their death there’s a grace period and then the copyright runs out.
The problem is the likes of Disney get special treatment. Their patents should have run out long before any of us were born and yet they didn’t.
The problem isn’t the system itself, the problem is the abuse of the system.
No. The problem is that that system was created and lobbied for literally by Disney and other big “IP holders” like music labels. That “while” after the holder’s death has been increasing to ridiculous levels. They are not getting special treatment by abusing the system, they’re changing the system to benefit them. And don’t be fooled into thinking this benefits bedroom musicians, it’s quite the opposite. <img alt="" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Extended_Tom_Bell%27s_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg/1024px-Extended_Tom_Bell%27s_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg.png"> (source)
And don’t get me started on how the US treats copyright internationally. The whole world has been effectively subjugated to incredibly ass-backwards rules without even a say in it. “If it’s accessible via the internet it counts as officially published in the United States”? fuck off.
On the other side of the coin, we have agreements such as the Berne Convention, a 1886 document that still governs a good chunk of international copyright relations. Even the “good” parts of such agreements are terribly inadequate for the Information Age where works can be published and redistributed globally with little effort
Just an FYI, that graph is entirely unreadable in dark mode. I’m not sure why they chose to make a graph of all things have a transparent background.
Walt Disney wasn’t the creator of most of his works so his death shouldn’t be factored in.
I have a real issue here too. Though mine more centers around the purchase of IP to bury it because it would be competition. How many amazing creations that would benefit humanity and make all of our lives more livable are buried in archives at these big corpos?
This is what I would like to see fixed, in the most aggressive way possible. I want a clock on the ownership to bring a product to market based on the purchased patant and if that clock runs out, ownership reverts back to the creator.
They don’t seem to be protecting creators from getting their work subsumed by AI, so they’re clearly not fit for purpose. But I do think there needs to be some protection for artists and creators, it’s just that either the present laws are shit or the courts can be bought.
Patent law is the foundation of which our entire civilisation rest upon. I can agree it can be flawed and/or exploited sometimes.
But only a useful idiot would want patents to not exist at all. It’s the only thing that protects your innovation from being stolen by those with means to outproduce you.
It’s literally there so when you invent a new product, others (wealthy companies) can’t just steal your design and flood the market with cheaper versions due to the fact that they can mass produce it.
Software patents are pretty close to universally bad. Software moves fast and twenty years is ridiculous, when video codecs have grown to be biggest format and then been overtaken by their successors which in turn are overtaken by their own successors before the first codecs lose their patent then you know something is going wrong. Hardware patents have their place as you say, but software moves very quickly and can innovate just fine without the need for patents.
In theory you could make them viable by shortening the life, to just 5 years or something, but at that point the cost of administering them probably outweighs any benefits (if there would actually be any).
Copyright is another matter, I think we probably need that in some form (though the stupid length of copyright at the moment is even stupider for software)
I’m far from an expert on this particular subject, but I could definitely see this being true. I guess I was thinking more about art/inventions
Yeah, that’s fair
Learn to keep secrets better. China isn’t exactly a vigorous enforcer of us patents anyway.
Eh who cares it’s all big corporations now any way.
Bullshit! The truth is that to even sell your product in the first place you have to sell it to a big corporation for peanuts so that they can then get rich on your idea because you can’t afford the marketing or production cost to popularize your product on your own. And software patents have even less reason to exist. They’re just pure evil!
Yes you generally do need to involve a business partner that has the means to produce the product in any meaningful capacity.
Or, if we go by what you want. They don’t even have to partner with you. They’ll just start making it themselves and push you out of the market because there’s absolutely nothing that would prevent them to.
TIL civilisation didn’t exist before the 20th century
You’re an idiot. we’ve had patents since the 15:th century.
No, they have utility as people shouldn’t be able to rip off other teams work as that disincentivizes any product research , innovation or the ability to sustain yourself based on sales of your art.
The only thing idiotic is the notion that these systems need to die rather than be refined.
I agree. The only big problem I’m aware of is the length of validity for patents/copyright (and how large corporations for years were getting the laws changed so their IP could last even longer).
After a decade or two, surely you have profiteered enough or at least had enough time to try profiteering from your idea or works? Time for public domain? 75 years (i think it is for copyright) seems crazy to me.
Me not experto though, but I do think lowering the time you can hold your invention or works hostage from the world would be amazing for the general public and advancement of tech (even though when I say that, it sounds like stealing a baby from a mother).
For patents it is much shorter than copyright. Copyright being roughly the lifespan of the creator makes sense when you think George RR Martin has been writing Game of Thrones for 20 years before it appears on HBO. Under a shorter span you could have people selling fanfiction of works before their creators saw any real profit.
IMO what needs reform is that if the public invests in your research the state shoukd hold a percentage of the revenue from the sale of that good. The USA did this until Reagan.
Capcom should start their patent for 2D fighting games and see what happens to Super Smash Bros
Someone in the patent office got bribed.
This entire regime is for sale. Top to bottom.
Get ready for “anti-woke” Nintendo games!
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/31c42abd-1682-4012-b103-5f31f6333691.jpeg">
Get ready for whatever this is
I’m surprised that Palworld was even able to release, honestly.
What’s frustrating is that the thing that is arguably questionable (the art of some of the characters) isn’t what is the subject of anything. Nope. Ball throwing.
That’s because copyright and trademark are more specific than patents. You have to use the exact look to be in violation. Patents are more of a vibes protection. You can sue for close enough.
Why? Anybody who’s played it knows it only has a passing resemblance to Pokémon. Once you play the game, you realize how different it is in its mechanics and story from pokemon.
Nintendo doesn’t own the idea of monster taming. The idea predates their company by quite a bit actually.
I agree, but Nintendo usually gets away with legally bullying companies
I’m going to patent electrons passing through a xor gate
You can get a licence from Nintendo if you like.
patent nand and nor! You’ll get much more out of it
You can probably get away with it if you write it in a confusing enough fashion; but you need to make it really confusing - to the point even CPU architecture experts could miss it unless they pay very close attention; and remember that the claims - which are the only part of the patent that has any legal meaning - may be limited by law to a single sentence each, but there is no limit on how cumbersome each sentence is; additionally, semicolons are not sentence terminators; this means that this entire comment I just wrote is technically a only one sentence.
Nah, you just need to get a friendly judge to tell whoever decides to dispute your patent that they’re wrong and your patent is totally valid and innovative
Prior art exists of that though so you wouldn’t be able to. I know you’re making a joke though lol.
If Nintendo can patent MOUNTS in the year of our lord 2025, that lemming can patent logic gates.
I thought this was about the ball throwing to capture monsters
They filed a fuck load of patents. This is one of them.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e8993fab-1085-4091-8ddd-76e7e547cd44.png">
Translation: mounts that can walk and fly. Which already exist in God knows how many games.
I fucking hate Nintendo.
The US patent system IS a colossal failure, of course it spits out failures
Well it also spits out lawsuits and lawsuits on top of those lawsuits.
And then a bunch of people get rich.n