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.
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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.