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.
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.
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
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
Send this topic
Print
Topic: Why current age 'video gaming' is a joke (Read 14794 times)
