Thoughts on business method patents from gamasutra
from gamasutra:
The vast majority of the respondents to this Question Of The Week were against the concept of software patents , and those that answered "no" answered with a great deal more fervor then those that said "yes". Among the reasons cited were a decided lack of expertise by the U.S. patent office, leading to costly and cumbersome litigation, that the very reason for the rapid growth of the games industry was due to a general lack of patents allowing ideas to be quickly built upon and refined, and that beyond stifling innovation, patents would be used to crush the "little guy."
Also brought up was a large disparity in how patents are handled in the U.S. compared to Europe and Asia, where it is often harder to enforce certain patent rights. [Query: where have more games been invented: US or Europe?]
Patents will only serve to ossify an already hardened market that few original IPs can penetrate, bringing the whole industry into a quagmire as lawyers fight out the definition of what parts of games can be patented, and add stress to an already overloaded court system.
-Ted Brown, Neversoft
No, and especially not for a term of 17 years. [sic. 20 years from filing] If the term were reduced to something more reasonable (say, 3-5 years) and if it is demonstrated that the patent office can do a far better job then it currently does with regard to determining the novelty of software inventions, then my feelings might change.
-Anonymous
The idea of patenting is based on the notion that "someone other than the patentee of a particular idea can only make use of the idea by first copying it off of the patentee". [huh? The patent process is right of exclusion for limited time in return for disclosure] But this notion is false. No matter what the invention, it is always possible for another person to invent the same thing independently. [try copyright] It should never happen that someone invents something but then discovers that they are blocked from selling it because of the Patent Office. Before awarding a patent, then, it should be established that there is very little chance of anyone else developing the same idea independently during the period covered by the patent. Unfortunately, considering that "double-clicking" (6,727,830), "drawing using XOR" (4,197,590), "run-length encoding" (4,207,599, 4,872,009), "one-click shopping" (5,960,411), "tabbed menus" (5,546,528), "using the internet for chat" (6,449,344), "buffering video" (5,371,551), "rotating a 3D camera" (4,734,690) and "mini-games during loading" (5,718,632) to name a few, have all been patented, it seems that no one at the Patent Office is even considering the difficulty of contriving a particular invention before they stamp it "approved" and collect their fee. What will we do when some company decides to sue us for infringing on their "method for turning letters from lowercase to uppercase" patent? It is said that Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell each independently developed the telephone at the same time. But since Bell was a few hours earlier in his patent application, he was awarded exclusive rights to market his invention. Doesn't anyone care that Gray suffered an injustice here? The fact that there were two people inventing the telephone simultaneously (and many more who were less successful) should have been a clue that the invention was just a corollary of recent and more important developments, and that there was no justification to oppress all inventors but one. When people are scrambling to the patent office to try to be the first in line to file their application, as is usually the case with software patents, it cannot be for an invention that is worthy of a patent.
-James Martin, Lumental
Software patents slow down innovation and increase the barriers to entry for startup developers. They are overly protective of rich established businesses due to the cost of patent defense. Patents reduce customer choice and bias the market in favor of the richest corporations. Patents don't encourage invention - they stifle it.
-Martin Linklater, Curly Monsters
I think the video game industry is seeing the effects of software patents with the recent McKool-Smith lawsuit. While patents may have the purpose of encouraging innovation, and may have even been effective at doing so for physical inventions, the fact of the matter is that current patents on software are horribly broken. The patent office doesn't have enough expertise or manpower to seriously examine patents on software to determine whether or not they are obvious or violate prior art restrictions. They depend on the courts to decide, which only works for people that can afford legal battles. Plus, the length of patent protection was meaningful in slower times, but will a software or gameplay invention still be relevant in twenty years? Coupled with the incestuous cross-licensing that goes on among large software companies, this makes for an environment that stifles innovation in small game companies and software houses - while writing any piece of code, no matter how novel, you will violate some existing patents. It's inevitable. But don't go looking to see if you do - you can't fix it, and knowing about the problem makes you liable for even more damages! The most you can hope for as a small software writer is that you'll be allowed to cross-license your invention, and in return for using your ideas, the big companies won't sue you into bankruptcy. Some game ideas should be protected - characters, innovative game hardware, and art resources. But imagine where the industry would be today if there were a patent on platform games, or software for positioning a camera in first-person perspective, or the challenge of collecting items for the purpose of advancing the plot! We have all built on the shoulders of giants, and patenting gameplay elements or software only hurts the industry as a whole, by restricting financial success to only those who already have it, and stifling innovation in newcomers and small development houses.
-Anonymous
No. By patenting the things they come up with, innovation will be stifled. No longer will people be able to build upon previous ideas to create something new and cool. No longer will people be able to just experiment and play around with game design or tech, because they'll then have to get a lawyer in to analyze every tiny bit of code & game design in the game to find out what patents they infringe on so that they can get the licenses for them. Compare the amount of innovation that has occurred in the past 15 years of game development, and then compare that to the innovation in, say, the car industry, or home appliances. Your kettle is almost exactly the same as it was 15 years ago, as is your car. Just with newer materials and more curves. Meanwhile games (technology especially) have progressed in leaps and bounds, and the sharing & open nature fosters this. People build on top of everyone else's work, instead of being forced to reinvent the wheel, or pay money to be allowed to build off someone else's work. If the games industry embraces patents like these lawyers suggest, you can kiss any improvement in any aspect of the games industry goodbye.
-Tristan Williams, Ratbag Games
Patents are an antiquated system that hamper creative development instead of harboring it. The concept of patents works great in a world where every creator is a crook who can only form ideas by copying the competition. Patents fail for those creators who prefer to envision their own ideas, which in many cases may be very similar to ideas already created. It takes away their time, delegating them to task of researching cryptic patent documents to make sure their own idea is legal to use. If developers focus on fully tapping the potential of an idea for their game then competitors would have a harder time creating a better or equal system. Even if the copied game improves the original idea, you still win because you have something new to improve your own game with for the sequel and the creative process continues.
-Anonymous
To quote the article: "... to reward inventors who come forward and share their inventions with the public by granting them a limited period of exclusivity in which they can exploit the fruits of their labor." The problem is that games are relatively short lived, thus patents offer practically unlimited period of protection to them. Also a part of designing games is to combine successful ideas. What would have happened if say Westwood would have patented the RTS-genre at the time of Dune II and decided not to license it to anyone? We would have never seen games like WarCraft and BattleZone, not to mention the countless other RTS games. Naturally as long as you can get patents for your games, it's good business to acquire them, it's just not the game making business.
-Jarno Rajala, University of Turku
No, for the same reasons I disagree with the concept of software patents in general. Patents should be for implementations of systems that actually have some mechanism that has a physical effect. Otherwise the trend of defensive patenting will roll into the gaming industry, further burdening the small independent developers. Patents were never originally intended to be used to protect the invention of logical concepts.
-Nathan Adams
Absolutely not. Removing the ability to add new innovations to the work of others forces the entire industry into a slow grind that will be outstripped by other areas of the world where the patent frenzy in software has not yet been achieved. Games achieve a level of complexity beyond the ability of any law office to detail and discover every possible patent within it at reasonable cost. Attempting to do so bleeds cash for no net gain. "The only winners are the lawyers." Creators, sellers, and customers all lose out.
-Charles Boland
The way the U.S. deals with patents is absurd compared with Europe. What is often neglected in assigning patents to software is that they have to be innovative and that reasonably speaking, another person who specializes in the same field should not be able to have come to the same 'invention' without making a leap of logic. Almost none of the software patents have this and should never have been approved. If you look at the examples it's hard to imagine how these patents have been allowed, there is nothing revolutionary about them. On the subject in general, it is a popular belief among some of the most influential software engineers that patents hinder progress. Instead of many different parties working on a new concept, only one party has the rights to and may allow other parties to work on it. In the U.S. the patent system is unfortunately flawed, patents are assigned to techniques or algorithms that should never have been allowed, sometimes because they are already widely in use. Example: A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory, the system comprising: a compiler for receiving source code and generating executable code from the source code, the source code comprising an expression comprising an operator associated with a first operand and a second operand, the expression evaluating to true when the first operand and the second operand point to different memory locations. (IS NOT OPERATOR) This patent was filed in 2003! My point, because of the way patents work in the U.S., you unfortunately have to resort to patents, because otherwise they can be assigned to others, even when you were already working on, or even completed, a procedure or algorithm that the patents covers. Until they fix the system, you are forced to work with it.
-Anonymous
The vast majority of the respondents to this Question Of The Week were against the concept of software patents , and those that answered "no" answered with a great deal more fervor then those that said "yes". Among the reasons cited were a decided lack of expertise by the U.S. patent office, leading to costly and cumbersome litigation, that the very reason for the rapid growth of the games industry was due to a general lack of patents allowing ideas to be quickly built upon and refined, and that beyond stifling innovation, patents would be used to crush the "little guy."
Also brought up was a large disparity in how patents are handled in the U.S. compared to Europe and Asia, where it is often harder to enforce certain patent rights. [Query: where have more games been invented: US or Europe?]
Patents will only serve to ossify an already hardened market that few original IPs can penetrate, bringing the whole industry into a quagmire as lawyers fight out the definition of what parts of games can be patented, and add stress to an already overloaded court system.
-Ted Brown, Neversoft
No, and especially not for a term of 17 years. [sic. 20 years from filing] If the term were reduced to something more reasonable (say, 3-5 years) and if it is demonstrated that the patent office can do a far better job then it currently does with regard to determining the novelty of software inventions, then my feelings might change.
-Anonymous
The idea of patenting is based on the notion that "someone other than the patentee of a particular idea can only make use of the idea by first copying it off of the patentee". [huh? The patent process is right of exclusion for limited time in return for disclosure] But this notion is false. No matter what the invention, it is always possible for another person to invent the same thing independently. [try copyright] It should never happen that someone invents something but then discovers that they are blocked from selling it because of the Patent Office. Before awarding a patent, then, it should be established that there is very little chance of anyone else developing the same idea independently during the period covered by the patent. Unfortunately, considering that "double-clicking" (6,727,830), "drawing using XOR" (4,197,590), "run-length encoding" (4,207,599, 4,872,009), "one-click shopping" (5,960,411), "tabbed menus" (5,546,528), "using the internet for chat" (6,449,344), "buffering video" (5,371,551), "rotating a 3D camera" (4,734,690) and "mini-games during loading" (5,718,632) to name a few, have all been patented, it seems that no one at the Patent Office is even considering the difficulty of contriving a particular invention before they stamp it "approved" and collect their fee. What will we do when some company decides to sue us for infringing on their "method for turning letters from lowercase to uppercase" patent? It is said that Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell each independently developed the telephone at the same time. But since Bell was a few hours earlier in his patent application, he was awarded exclusive rights to market his invention. Doesn't anyone care that Gray suffered an injustice here? The fact that there were two people inventing the telephone simultaneously (and many more who were less successful) should have been a clue that the invention was just a corollary of recent and more important developments, and that there was no justification to oppress all inventors but one. When people are scrambling to the patent office to try to be the first in line to file their application, as is usually the case with software patents, it cannot be for an invention that is worthy of a patent.
-James Martin, Lumental
Software patents slow down innovation and increase the barriers to entry for startup developers. They are overly protective of rich established businesses due to the cost of patent defense. Patents reduce customer choice and bias the market in favor of the richest corporations. Patents don't encourage invention - they stifle it.
-Martin Linklater, Curly Monsters
I think the video game industry is seeing the effects of software patents with the recent McKool-Smith lawsuit. While patents may have the purpose of encouraging innovation, and may have even been effective at doing so for physical inventions, the fact of the matter is that current patents on software are horribly broken. The patent office doesn't have enough expertise or manpower to seriously examine patents on software to determine whether or not they are obvious or violate prior art restrictions. They depend on the courts to decide, which only works for people that can afford legal battles. Plus, the length of patent protection was meaningful in slower times, but will a software or gameplay invention still be relevant in twenty years? Coupled with the incestuous cross-licensing that goes on among large software companies, this makes for an environment that stifles innovation in small game companies and software houses - while writing any piece of code, no matter how novel, you will violate some existing patents. It's inevitable. But don't go looking to see if you do - you can't fix it, and knowing about the problem makes you liable for even more damages! The most you can hope for as a small software writer is that you'll be allowed to cross-license your invention, and in return for using your ideas, the big companies won't sue you into bankruptcy. Some game ideas should be protected - characters, innovative game hardware, and art resources. But imagine where the industry would be today if there were a patent on platform games, or software for positioning a camera in first-person perspective, or the challenge of collecting items for the purpose of advancing the plot! We have all built on the shoulders of giants, and patenting gameplay elements or software only hurts the industry as a whole, by restricting financial success to only those who already have it, and stifling innovation in newcomers and small development houses.
-Anonymous
No. By patenting the things they come up with, innovation will be stifled. No longer will people be able to build upon previous ideas to create something new and cool. No longer will people be able to just experiment and play around with game design or tech, because they'll then have to get a lawyer in to analyze every tiny bit of code & game design in the game to find out what patents they infringe on so that they can get the licenses for them. Compare the amount of innovation that has occurred in the past 15 years of game development, and then compare that to the innovation in, say, the car industry, or home appliances. Your kettle is almost exactly the same as it was 15 years ago, as is your car. Just with newer materials and more curves. Meanwhile games (technology especially) have progressed in leaps and bounds, and the sharing & open nature fosters this. People build on top of everyone else's work, instead of being forced to reinvent the wheel, or pay money to be allowed to build off someone else's work. If the games industry embraces patents like these lawyers suggest, you can kiss any improvement in any aspect of the games industry goodbye.
-Tristan Williams, Ratbag Games
Patents are an antiquated system that hamper creative development instead of harboring it. The concept of patents works great in a world where every creator is a crook who can only form ideas by copying the competition. Patents fail for those creators who prefer to envision their own ideas, which in many cases may be very similar to ideas already created. It takes away their time, delegating them to task of researching cryptic patent documents to make sure their own idea is legal to use. If developers focus on fully tapping the potential of an idea for their game then competitors would have a harder time creating a better or equal system. Even if the copied game improves the original idea, you still win because you have something new to improve your own game with for the sequel and the creative process continues.
-Anonymous
To quote the article: "... to reward inventors who come forward and share their inventions with the public by granting them a limited period of exclusivity in which they can exploit the fruits of their labor." The problem is that games are relatively short lived, thus patents offer practically unlimited period of protection to them. Also a part of designing games is to combine successful ideas. What would have happened if say Westwood would have patented the RTS-genre at the time of Dune II and decided not to license it to anyone? We would have never seen games like WarCraft and BattleZone, not to mention the countless other RTS games. Naturally as long as you can get patents for your games, it's good business to acquire them, it's just not the game making business.
-Jarno Rajala, University of Turku
No, for the same reasons I disagree with the concept of software patents in general. Patents should be for implementations of systems that actually have some mechanism that has a physical effect. Otherwise the trend of defensive patenting will roll into the gaming industry, further burdening the small independent developers. Patents were never originally intended to be used to protect the invention of logical concepts.
-Nathan Adams
Absolutely not. Removing the ability to add new innovations to the work of others forces the entire industry into a slow grind that will be outstripped by other areas of the world where the patent frenzy in software has not yet been achieved. Games achieve a level of complexity beyond the ability of any law office to detail and discover every possible patent within it at reasonable cost. Attempting to do so bleeds cash for no net gain. "The only winners are the lawyers." Creators, sellers, and customers all lose out.
-Charles Boland
The way the U.S. deals with patents is absurd compared with Europe. What is often neglected in assigning patents to software is that they have to be innovative and that reasonably speaking, another person who specializes in the same field should not be able to have come to the same 'invention' without making a leap of logic. Almost none of the software patents have this and should never have been approved. If you look at the examples it's hard to imagine how these patents have been allowed, there is nothing revolutionary about them. On the subject in general, it is a popular belief among some of the most influential software engineers that patents hinder progress. Instead of many different parties working on a new concept, only one party has the rights to and may allow other parties to work on it. In the U.S. the patent system is unfortunately flawed, patents are assigned to techniques or algorithms that should never have been allowed, sometimes because they are already widely in use. Example: A system for determining if two operands point to different locations in memory, the system comprising: a compiler for receiving source code and generating executable code from the source code, the source code comprising an expression comprising an operator associated with a first operand and a second operand, the expression evaluating to true when the first operand and the second operand point to different memory locations. (IS NOT OPERATOR) This patent was filed in 2003! My point, because of the way patents work in the U.S., you unfortunately have to resort to patents, because otherwise they can be assigned to others, even when you were already working on, or even completed, a procedure or algorithm that the patents covers. Until they fix the system, you are forced to work with it.
-Anonymous
posted by Lawrence B. Ebert at 2:58 AM
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