"Bad patents like this cast a massive shadow on the industry."
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.”
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)
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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.
TIL civilisation didn’t exist before the 20th century
You’re an idiot. we’ve had patents since the 15:th century.
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
Eh who cares it’s all big corporations now any way.
Learn to keep secrets better. China isn’t exactly a vigorous enforcer of us patents anyway.