geteilt von: 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.”
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Fuck software patents.
Copyright made sense when it was a decade or two. Industrial patents seem basically functional. Trademark’s mostly truth-in-advertising for consumer choice.
But software patents aren’t about how you do something - they’re claiming the entire concept, in the broadest possible terms, and killing it. Straight-up murdering that potential. It is denied the necessary iterative competition that turns dogshit first implementations into must-have features. Nobody’s gonna care in twenty years.
Entire hardware form-factors have come and gone in a single decade. Can you imagine if swipe keyboards were still single-vendor, and still worked like in 2009? Or maybe Apple bought them, and endlessly bragged about how Android can’t do [blank], because fifty thousand dollars changed hands in the 3G era.
How many games would not exist, if Nintendo had decided they own sidescrollers? A whole genre, wiped out, because a piece of paper says those mechanics are theft.