According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn’t just a moment of questionable legal theory. It’s an indictment of American patent law.
“Broadly, I don’t disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents,” said Sigmon, whose opinions do not represent those of his firm and clients. “They have been an embarrassing failure of the US patent system.”
I can’t wait to play Elden Ring 2 when it’s made by Nintendo because Elden Ring used summoning and now only runs at 12 fps.
Nintendo also owns the rights to platformers, racing games, and rpgs. Tough luck, that’s just how it is.
NPC dialogs? Owned by Nintendo too.
Don’t forget alarm clocks
Or ‘love hotels’. You want to rent a room by the hour, Mario gets his cut.
This is why I can’t support Nintendo.
death to intellectual property
And nintendo.
I’m going to patent electrons passing through a xor gate
You can get a licence from Nintendo if you like.
You can probably get away with it if you write it in a confusing enough fashion; but you need to make it really confusing - to the point even CPU architecture experts could miss it unless they pay very close attention; and remember that the claims - which are the only part of the patent that has any legal meaning - may be limited by law to a single sentence each, but there is no limit on how cumbersome each sentence is; additionally, semicolons are not sentence terminators; this means that this entire comment I just wrote is technically a only one sentence.
Nah, you just need to get a friendly judge to tell whoever decides to dispute your patent that they’re wrong and your patent is totally valid and innovative
patent nand and nor! You’ll get much more out of it
Prior art exists of that though so you wouldn’t be able to. I know you’re making a joke though lol.
If Nintendo can patent MOUNTS in the year of our lord 2025, that lemming can patent logic gates.
I thought this was about the ball throwing to capture monsters
They filed a fuck load of patents. This is one of them.
Translation: mounts that can walk and fly. Which already exist in God knows how many games.
I fucking hate Nintendo.
Capcom should start their patent for 2D fighting games and see what happens to Super Smash Bros
Copyright and patent laws need to die.
Anyone who doesn’t understand this is a useful idiot.
Current system is obviously broken, but you don’t believe that artists and creators should have a right to control their intellectual property at all?
And yes, intellectual property is real whether you want it to be or not. And it’s not necessarily about money, but about controlling what can be done with your work.
For example, Bruce Springsteen should 100% be allowed to tell Trump to fuck off and stop using his music at rallys.
What would be the mechanism to do that without IP?
Artists and creators already don’t control their intellectual property. The megacorporations do, and they have always violated the intellectual property rights of small artists with little to no consequences.
Intellectual property laws are a recent and catastrophic mistake. For the majority of the history of our species, no one could retain sole ownership of art. And it was better. We make the best art when we trade it back & forth and reiterate on it.
We should scrap intellectual property laws, and heavily tax corporate AI use to fund a national artists stipend to provide them a good standard of living.
I also believe all intellectual property laws shouldn’t exist, so patent, copyright, and trademark.
To answer your first question no.
Intellectual property is a societal construct and it is as real as racism is. Which isn’t saying much.
If an artist doesn’t want their music to be heard and possibly replicated, altered, or used in a way they don’t like then it is their responsibility to never release it. Only by hiding it can they keep the world from misusing it.
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The thing that irks me the most is that everyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liberal or some shit. No matter how grounded and nuanced your take is.
Every leftist has their own, ultra specific orthodoxy, and they will always find something about yours that makes you “not a real leftist.”
Nothing new either, it’s happened countless times. It’s so self-sabotaging.
You have no take other than approving the purchase and sale of our culture controlled by corporations.
You say IP is for the little guy, the average federal copyright lawsuit cost a quarter of a million dollars to pursue.
You have no clue about remix culture which was destroyed by profiteers. Corporations control the majority of artist’s commercial music. Many artists don’t own their own work.
Corporations constantly steal IP. AI has shown us that they don’t respect the very laws they created.
The only person living in a dystopia and loving it is you. The abolishment of IP would cause an explosion of science and art like the world hasn’t seen since they created laws to prevent it.
Not the person you responded to, but how would a recording artist earn a living in that model? If their work can get scooped up by a mega corporation and sold for pennies on the dollar due to the massive existing resources, reach, and infrastructure available to the corporation, what protections would there be against that happening?
Artist that want to make money can preform or sell their work like they have always done. IP is about commercial interests like royalties and licensing. This has nothing to do with the actual promotion of arts and science. It is about control.
Most artist don’t do it to make money even. This confusion of expression and commercial interest is the crux of what we are dealing with.
There is no natural protection from someone copying, remixing, or reinventing your work. This is literally how art is made. No one creates in a vacuum and everyone is inspired by someone else.
There are already no protections for the little guy. Corporations borrow and use whatever they want. The IP system is NOT for the average person. It is designed to benefit and enrich an extreme minority and it does this well.
Whatever you say Motoass!
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I just returned an insult, you are welcome dumbass.
Blocked for being someone not worth talking to.
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Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.
If the internet actually enforced copyright to the letter of the law, it wouldnt exist in its current form. No memes, no game streamers or videogame youtubers, no unlicensed music, no image sharing. Copyright needs to be defended to the best of the holders ability otherwise they lose it. It would necessitate a constant stream of scanning and policing and litigation thatd be so taxing on platforms theyd just shut down. Video game streaming operates in a legal grey zone because the law is flawed.
Theres a reason programming tools are almost all open source. From languages to libraries to software, the alternative is just too inefficient.
Copyright is an old shitty system from the days when books required publishers who had to register an ISBN for everything they published. The modern equivalent would be if every unique copyrightable contribution on the internet first required submitting the media to a government agency to store a hash of it and issue a UUID.
I wouldnt say that IP doesnt exist, but once you share information with someone, they are now also a holder of that IP, just by the nature of reality.
Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.
If the person who created it cannot profit from it, then nobody should be able to.
I think most artists would agree.
Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.
Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.
Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.
If you want a capitalist society it needs to die.
If Trump can sell Springsteen’s music cheaper than Springsteen then that’s just the free market.
If Trump can sell Springsteen’s music cheaper than Springsteen then that’s just the free market.
Exactly. And why would Springsteen have any incentive to distribute (or ultimately, even record maybe) any of his music in this proposed reality?
Not a fan of Springsteen, was just the first example that came to mind.
I’m just trying to imagine the incalculable amount of great music we would have been deprived of had we been living in a world without IP laws.
They might have written them, but we’d never get to hear it.
If we weren’t in an ultra capitalist society, it could maybe work and that would be wonderful. But we’re not, so just getting rid of IP entirely is just a bad idea.
It’s imaginary property. It’s not real and only exists in our heads. Saying someone stole your “intellectual property” is akin to saying they “stole your idea.”
It is about the money, as well. Nobody should be able to own an idea.
Bruce Springsteen will just have to grow up and get over it.
So just no music business then?
No movies. No TV shows. No comics…
It may surprise you to know that people produced music before IP laws existed.
No art, no poetry, no video games. . .
IMO creators should have better protections - the current laws don’t seem to stop AI gobbling up their work. But at the same time this Nintendo thing is obviously bullshit. I’m surprised the court * allowed it. Probably a decision made by a very old Christian man who doesn’t understand what games are and can’t use a smartphone.
* Oops decision was made by patent office who really should know better
Yeah it’s clearly broken. But there is a complete lack of nuance in these “get rid of IP and copyright completely (and if you disagree you’re an idiot)” arguments. They’re just supremely unhelpful.
Yep I’m right there with you. Artists of all types should be entitled to the proceeds of their work. Also, if I were creative and something I’d created was plagiarised, I’d be unhappy about that too. Just because a big company abuses a system doesn’t mean it shouldn’t protect individuals.
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Pretty neat how capitalists invented art and it isn’t at all an intrinsic part of the human experience since at least 40,000 years ago.
They certainly patented it.
My point is that people make stuff even without a profit incentive.
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Where did I say that it did?
I’m just trying to picture what this world would actually look like, and it seems shit.
People will still create music, but without having any sense of ownership over it whatsoever, there is zero incentive to distribute it.
Whether you believe in private property or not doesn’t change the fact that artists will always feel a sense of ownership over their creations
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Why are you people always so fucking rude when you’re shit is challenged in any way?
Look at my other comments in this thread if you care to actually understand my position. I never even suggested that people would stop making music.
I even said that it could maybe work if we weren’t in an ultra capitalist society. But we are, so completely getting rid of the concept of IP is a bad idea.
No, they have utility as people shouldn’t be able to rip off other teams work as that disincentivizes any product research , innovation or the ability to sustain yourself based on sales of your art.
The only thing idiotic is the notion that these systems need to die rather than be refined.
I agree. The only big problem I’m aware of is the length of validity for patents/copyright (and how large corporations for years were getting the laws changed so their IP could last even longer).
After a decade or two, surely you have profiteered enough or at least had enough time to try profiteering from your idea or works? Time for public domain? 75 years (i think it is for copyright) seems crazy to me.
Me not experto though, but I do think lowering the time you can hold your invention or works hostage from the world would be amazing for the general public and advancement of tech (even though when I say that, it sounds like stealing a baby from a mother).
For patents it is much shorter than copyright. Copyright being roughly the lifespan of the creator makes sense when you think George RR Martin has been writing Game of Thrones for 20 years before it appears on HBO. Under a shorter span you could have people selling fanfiction of works before their creators saw any real profit.
IMO what needs reform is that if the public invests in your research the state shoukd hold a percentage of the revenue from the sale of that good. The USA did this until Reagan.
They don’t seem to be protecting creators from getting their work subsumed by AI, so they’re clearly not fit for purpose. But I do think there needs to be some protection for artists and creators, it’s just that either the present laws are shit or the courts can be bought.
Patent law is the foundation of which our entire civilisation rest upon. I can agree it can be flawed and/or exploited sometimes.
But only a useful idiot would want patents to not exist at all. It’s the only thing that protects your innovation from being stolen by those with means to outproduce you.
It’s literally there so when you invent a new product, others (wealthy companies) can’t just steal your design and flood the market with cheaper versions due to the fact that they can mass produce it.
Software patents are pretty close to universally bad. Software moves fast and twenty years is ridiculous, when video codecs have grown to be biggest format and then been overtaken by their successors which in turn are overtaken by their own successors before the first codecs lose their patent then you know something is going wrong. Hardware patents have their place as you say, but software moves very quickly and can innovate just fine without the need for patents.
In theory you could make them viable by shortening the life, to just 5 years or something, but at that point the cost of administering them probably outweighs any benefits (if there would actually be any).
Copyright is another matter, I think we probably need that in some form (though the stupid length of copyright at the moment is even stupider for software)
Software patents are pretty close to universally bad.
I’m far from an expert on this particular subject, but I could definitely see this being true. I guess I was thinking more about art/inventions
Yeah, that’s fair
TIL civilisation didn’t exist before the 20th century
You’re an idiot. we’ve had patents since the 15:th century.
Learn to keep secrets better. China isn’t exactly a vigorous enforcer of us patents anyway.
Eh who cares it’s all big corporations now any way.
The USPTO is notorious for granting insane patents knowing they are invalid or too vague and expect the court system to be the final arbiter. It’s almost as if they like stirring shit up for there own amusement.
I’d wager these video game illiterates look at 1 thing: do they recognize the name of the company?
If the answer to that is ‘yes,’ then they will give that company whatever they want. If the answer is ‘no,’ then you’re fucked.
Someone in the patent office got bribed.
This entire regime is for sale. Top to bottom.
Get ready for “anti-woke” Nintendo games!
Get ready for whatever this is
I’m fully stopped. Now what?
Hammer time
The time for “collaborate and listen” has passed. Now, the time for Nintendo to bring down hammer go hammer mc hammer yo hammer and the rest can go and play has arrived.
“They have been an embarrassing failure of the US
patent system.“ seems like a trend these daysI’m surprised that Palworld was even able to release, honestly.
What’s frustrating is that the thing that is arguably questionable (the art of some of the characters) isn’t what is the subject of anything. Nope. Ball throwing.
That’s because copyright and trademark are more specific than patents. You have to use the exact look to be in violation. Patents are more of a vibes protection. You can sue for close enough.
Why? Anybody who’s played it knows it only has a passing resemblance to Pokémon. Once you play the game, you realize how different it is in its mechanics and story from pokemon.
Nintendo doesn’t own the idea of monster taming. The idea predates their company by quite a bit actually.
I agree, but Nintendo usually gets away with legally bullying companies
