[quote]As Greg points out, the people who are most likely to object to patents are people don’t want to be hindered in their ability to use technology in their livelihood, but are still highly protective of the fruits of their own labors. Many of the same game developers who get so riled up by software patents also don’t want people copying and redistributing their games (or game assets) without their permission (or without paying for it). Copyright they understand, because it protects them. Patents they don’t understand, because it protects others from them.
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There is a huge difference from not wanting people to make binary copies of a produced games (much like one would copy a book), than there is to release the sourcecode for the game, to encourage innovation.
Take Alien Flux, as a very good example. Most of the code is open source (not as in gpl, but still) - Cas often points people to look in the source code for hints how to do stuff. This is a very good thing - it makes people produce better stuff, since they don’t have to start from scratch. That said, he ofcourse doesn’t want people to steal his sale by copying the product, and redistributing it. Most games out there that are open sourced, have their CODE openend up - not the artwork. Since this is copyrightable in some way.
[quote] This is all well and good if you’re in the business of using new technologies, but what if you’re in the business of developing new technologies? The work that goes into developing a unique and novel solution that will be useful to an entire industry is rarely trivial, though reimplementing that solution once it’s been demonstrated and described may often be, and therein lies the problem.
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Yes, but as you said yourself - the problem is that patents are granted, in what seems to be without thought whatsoever!
Fix this, (and the longevity) and I’ll wager that most wouldn’t have problems. But as it stands now - software patents are lame.
Imagine someone in the good old days patented books!! - I know this wasn’t the case, but some future patent might have profound social and technological problems.
Currently we’re seeing a core technology of the internet becoming a target of a patent (plugins in browsers). The result? Microsoft and other companies have begun to remove plugins, and redesign its plugin technology (don’t know what they’ll come up with though). The result? all websites using plugins (quite a lot, flash is used very much) will stop working. Is this really a good thing? - I fail to see that. If we had 3 years of life on software patents, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. But somehow some dickass company/decission process made the patents last 20+ years. “To save the small companies” - yeah, right…
[quote]The year the company was founded two of the largest animation tools companies released tools based on the technology we had presented, and discussed with them in detail. Lacking the marketing dollars and distribution channels of these long-established industry players we were unable to compete, despite the fact that our solution was still a couple of years ahead of what was being offered.
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You tell people how to do it, and yet you don’t have anything to back it up? If you wanted to license this to the companies, make an implementation - tell how to use the technology, and license it. Make it worthwhile for them to use your implementation instead of rolling their own - ofcourse, this is all history and everybody is always wiser after decisions have been made…
My problem with patents, is probably that I am a consumer. I don’t care about large corporations, how they make money and what not. What I do want, is the best possible product, best quality for the right price. More competitors make this more true than a monopoly. Patents are a legal monopoly. Nothing more, nothing less.
Getting back to the patent process, as you said yourself: The patent process is flawed. But why the hell do we then use it??? - Fix it, then use it. Patents can have a seriously profound impact on the whole industry! We don’t turn on a flawed nuclear reactor do we?
We CAN fix the process, so we should. The last 10 years hasn’t seen anyone trying to fix it…
My rant 
