As a teen, I was into law and computers, so I wanted to be a software patent attorney. Partway through my CS program, I did some FOSS work and realized just how awful software patents can be.
I don’t understand how anyone can actually make software patents. What kind of person can get far enough into a software career and not realize how utterly evil they are?
Length alone makes them obscene. The classic example in games is minigames during a load screen - which happened in exactly one game, and then belonged to Namco until after we stopped caring about load screens. They strangled an entire subgenre. The feature was not allowed to exist, in an industry built from collective incremental experimentation.
Twenty years is an eternity in computing.
Twenty years ago, shaders weren’t a thing.
Twenty years earlier, video cards weren’t a thing.
Twenty years earlier, home computers weren’t a thing.
The entire RPG genre emerged from dork-ass teenagers wasting time on mainframes between 1973 and 1976. If the concepts involved had been patented and locked away, there would not be games with first-person perspective, overhead maps, generated dungeons, turn-based combat, or inventory, until the Nintendo 64.
Maybe. Or maybe we’d have less selection but more approaches to solve the same problem. That’s not great because it means games would be less approachable since they can’t borrow what works well.
I think software patents in general are stupid. The implementation is often obvious when looking at the end product, so the whole point of a patent (socialize information) isn’t relevant. The work to build it initially also isn’t particularly large for most things, certainly not to the level of pharmaceuticals. So the only purpose of a software patent is to block competition, there’s little if any social benefit to granting the patent.
As a teen, I was into law and computers, so I wanted to be a software patent attorney. Partway through my CS program, I did some FOSS work and realized just how awful software patents can be.
I don’t understand how anyone can actually make software patents. What kind of person can get far enough into a software career and not realize how utterly evil they are?
Length alone makes them obscene. The classic example in games is minigames during a load screen - which happened in exactly one game, and then belonged to Namco until after we stopped caring about load screens. They strangled an entire subgenre. The feature was not allowed to exist, in an industry built from collective incremental experimentation.
Twenty years is an eternity in computing.
Twenty years ago, shaders weren’t a thing.
Twenty years earlier, video cards weren’t a thing.
Twenty years earlier, home computers weren’t a thing.
The entire RPG genre emerged from dork-ass teenagers wasting time on mainframes between 1973 and 1976. If the concepts involved had been patented and locked away, there would not be games with first-person perspective, overhead maps, generated dungeons, turn-based combat, or inventory, until the Nintendo 64.
Maybe. Or maybe we’d have less selection but more approaches to solve the same problem. That’s not great because it means games would be less approachable since they can’t borrow what works well.
I think software patents in general are stupid. The implementation is often obvious when looking at the end product, so the whole point of a patent (socialize information) isn’t relevant. The work to build it initially also isn’t particularly large for most things, certainly not to the level of pharmaceuticals. So the only purpose of a software patent is to block competition, there’s little if any social benefit to granting the patent.
Other approaches would be similarly clamped-down. We’d quickly run out of ways to make things happen on a screen in response to pushing buttons.
The very concept of a video game console might still be owned by Fairchild.