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Why current age 'video gaming' is a joke
shmokes:
No, I'm talking about patenting very specific implementations. You couldn't just patent the concept of making a character jump onscreen because that wouldn't pass muster for a patent. Even putting aside prior art, patentable ideas must be new/innovative and non-obvious. And more importantly the whole point of a patent is that it's an exchange between the inventor and society. In exchange for a limited-period monopoly, the inventor must give specific instructions re: how to recreate his invention. Once the patent runs out it's no use to society to check out the guy's patent filing and see piece of paper that just says: Write code to make a guy onscreen jump.
I'm thinking about something more along the lines of the Unreal Engine. You grant them a patent on the entire engine, and during the monopoly period people can't use the specific code from the engine. But when the patent expires, the whole thing is public domain. I'd analogize the code to a particular recipe in pharmaceuticals. Pfizer patents Viagra--in so doing they hand over the recipe to society, but nobody else can commercialize it. That doesn't stop others from accomplishing the same result with another recipe (see: Cialis). The code in the unreal engine seems to me like the chemical makeup, the recipe for Viagra.
Vigo:
Umm..........The example of the guy jumping was simply an illustration. Of course it is not patentable since jumping occurs all the time in video games. I am referring to game functions that have not been concepted yet. For example, a unique item generator function in a game.
As you point out in your drug patent example, it is not the pill itself that is patented, nor what it can do. It is the ingredients that are patented. So therefore, the Unreal Engine as a whole cannot be patented, FPS game engines already existed. A patent only covers the invented methodology that is new and unique. So then, the unreal engine is not patentable, then it dissolved back to the "ingredients" as you call them in the drug example, i.e, stuff like the "guy jumping" as being the part that is under question. Things in a game engine shooting to light rendering only serve the purpose of shooting and rendering light. A patient on those would only basic function. All the patented ingredients in viagra are designed to give people an erection. The difference in a gaming engine is that it serves many functions, not just one. To think of it in a more tangible way, I remember the thread on the Street fight cabinet patient. It had a patient out for a system to create a hydraulic feedback on the joystick. Capcom did not create a patient covering the entire arcade machine. All the elements that make up a standard arcade machine at that point were unpatentable. only the hydraulic controls were novel. So why should the unreal engine be patentable when most of it's concepts already existed?
Now you can argue that a new idea itself in coding could be patentable, but things like inventory management or battle systems are just ideas. They cannot be patented. So what does that leave us with? Gaming physics; rendering, shading, the real gears that drive a game. That is nothing more than applied mathematics. you cannot patent math, even if it's use serves a tangle function.
And I also want to mention, while I agreed with you before that coding should not be copyrightable, I was only referring to coding functions. The Unreal engine as a whole should be copyrightable. If someone goes out there and copies the the unreal engine for their own game to run, that is plagarism and falls under copyright law.
shmokes:
Sorry . . . that's a lot to write based on a complete misunderstanding of the post you were responding to. I should have explained better. "Prior art" means that something you are trying to patent has already been done before (and it precludes getting a patent). So when I said, "Even putting aside prior art . . . , " I mean, even if nobody had made a videogame guy jump before, it wouldn't be patentable for those other reasons I listed.
I have the impression that you also misunderstand my pharmaceutical analogy as well. Viagra doesn't patent an end result. It patents an exact formula that leads to an end result. Similarly, Epic wouldn't be patenting the concept of a 3D engine. They would be patenting specific formulas that make up their 3D engine. The Crysis engine (like Cialis with erections) produces more or less the same result, but it uses different formulas (different code). That's basically how most patents work. When someone develops a better combine, the patent office doesn't say, "You can't patent that. People have been harvesting grain for years." They give you a patent on that particular way of harvesting crops. I'm not talking about patenting battle systems or inventory management. I'm talking about getting a patent on the particular method you use of creating those things (your code).
Math, by the way, isn't entirely unpatentable. Google would not be the company it is today if Larry Page/Stanford didn't have a patent on his search algorithm. You can go ahead and continue using math all you want. But Bing and Yahoo certainly cannot apply that algorithm to their search engines.
--- Quote from: Vigo on July 13, 2012, 04:52:51 pm ---If someone goes out there and copies the the unreal engine for their own game to run, that is plagarism and falls under copyright law.
--- End quote ---
Of course. That's the whole reason we're having this discussion. I said, "Frankly, I don't think that code should be copyrightable. It should be patentable." This is the case because courts, lacking specific legislation to deal with a new technology, eventually settled on protecting programmers' work under the guise of copyright. But copyright wasn't created for, nor is it suited to, protecting something like software code. Computer software is not a creative/artistic work the way a drawing or a book or an essay or a poem or a piece of music is. Code is more like the plumbing and wiring and framing of a building. There's never going to be a gallery displaying famous works of code. Nobody's going to publish an anthology of John Carmack's most innovative code (for people to just read for enjoyment, mind you, not for them to use which is illegal). Code, in short, is not art.
But more importantly, think about the policy behind our intellectual property system. Why do we do it? We worship the free market and abhor a market failure, the worst of which is the dreaded monopoly. When a monopoly develops naturally, we have a government agency that goes in and chops the company up. We hate monopolies. So why would a society so hellbent against monopolies actually grant monopolies to patent holders? The simple answer is to "encourage innovation". And while that's true, the better answer is that we aren't granting a monopoly. We're selling it. Because it's an exchange. As you can see from the link to Larry Page's Google patent, it's ALL there. In exchange for a temporary monopoly, he has to give us EVERYTHING. And when the patent runs out, that information that might otherwise have been locked up as a trade secret for a hundred years, even lost forever if the company ever disappeared (history is rife with examples), all that information belongs to society. Same goes for Viagra. When their patent runs out, society already has the recipe--and has had it since Pfizer submitted its patent application. On the day of expiration, the generics will already be on the shelves, identical to the original.
Copyright is an entirely different story. It's meant to protect creative expression. And, importantly, it protects it for a ---smurfing--- long time--the life of the author plus an additional 70 years! That creates some obvious problems for code. For one thing, who is the author? It could be hundreds of people. In that case we can treat it as an anonymous work and then the protection just lasts a flat 95 years from the date of publication or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever comes first. Obviously this means that no useful software can ever revert to the public domain. There will never be a time in history when 100 year old software will be useful to anyone. Moreover, since it's not an artistic work, like everything else that can be copyrighted, it's no good to the public while it's under copyright.
Computer code, IMO, is about innovation, not artistic expression. The patent system is designed to encourage innovation. A patent lasts only 17 years (IIRC), which makes WAY more sense for software than 75-120 years. Frankly, I think we need new legislation creating a "software patent", that would expire much sooner, maybe 10 years (taking into account the pace of change and innovation in the industry), and addressing any areas where the standard patent laws don't fit well on account of having been written before computers were a thing.
edit: typos
Vigo:
Phew that was a big wall-o-text, are you gunning for the X2 award there? ;D
I am sorry you have the impression that I don't understand patents perhaps you should reread my post. Things that you claim I don't get, such as "prior art" or not being able to patent end results...that is the exact points I am trying to make. So when you said you thought the unreal engine should be patentable, I am saying it can't for those exact reasons.
--- Quote from: shmokes on July 13, 2012, 08:21:46 pm ---Math, by the way, isn't entirely unpatentable. Google would not be the company it is today if Larry Page/Stanford didn't have a patent on his search algorithm.
--- End quote ---
First, math is not patentable. Read Gottschalk v. Benson, the supreme court determined that the math composing the makeup of computer software is not patentable. Read Diamond v. Diehr, they again determined the same thing. Math is not patentable.
Second, the Google Search Engine, nor the Algorithm itself is patented. What is patented is "PageRank" Pagerank was a utility that was made by one of the founders of Google. It was a utility that more or less ranked webpages by the number of times it could find an outside link to that webpage. Since math is not observed in the patent, Yahoo could use that exact algorithm to do whatever they want other than produce search results. So, they could use that exact algorithm to determine where to place advertising. Inversely, yahoo cannot rank pages on external link counts, even if they come up with a completely different mathematical method of doing so.
Now why does that not apply to game engines? Well, because most all aspects of game physics, rendering, shading, interface, etc already exist. you could have the most unique amazing algorithm the world for rendering lighting in a video game, but since light rendering is common to game engines, it cannot be patented. I come up with new physics method? It might look a hundred times more realistic, but sorry, its all just the math that really differentiates it from a previous physics model. We might be entering some new patentable turf we we progress to more VR/realism tech of video games down the road, but a gaming engine or unique coding or a game itself? No. Not patentable.
shmokes:
What you appear to be misunderstanding is my point. I wasn't trying to explain the concept of prior art to you. I was trying to explain that prior art is irrelevant because the concept of making a videogame character jump was never patentable.
I said:
--- Quote from: shmokes on July 13, 2012, 03:14:22 pm ---You couldn't just patent the concept of making a character jump onscreen because that wouldn't pass muster for a patent. Even putting aside prior art, patentable ideas must be new/innovative and non-obvious.
--- End quote ---
To which you responded:
--- Quote from: Vigo on July 13, 2012, 04:52:51 pm ---Umm..........The example of the guy jumping was simply an illustration. Of course it is not patentable since jumping occurs all the time in video games. I am referring to game functions that have not been concepted yet.
--- End quote ---
In other words, you obviously misunderstood my post. My point was that prior art wasn't the issue and your response was essentially, "Duh . . . I already know that prior art is the issue."
You are also getting basic patent principles wrong. You say that, "Since light rendering is common to game engines, it cannot be patented." That is not true. That's like saying that since directional input is common to videogames, Nintendo could not patent the directional pad on the NES gamepad. Which, of course, they did. Once again, prior art is not the reason light rendering as a concept could not be patented. Of course, prior art exists, but the courts would never even get to that question. Light rendering, as a concept, is fundamentally not patentable for more-or-less the same reasons that math by itself cannot be patented.
You're also wrong about math and software generally being unpatentable. It's a very muddy area of patent law. Specific applications of math when combined with a machine, are patentable. Patent holders for years have used the general purpose computer as the "machine" in that formula, arguing that their code alters or transforms the general purpose computer. And those patents have been issued time and time again.
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