I wish the damages they had to pay were enough to bankrupt them. “Companies” that do this sort of stuff are purely parasitical in nature should be taken down.

I’d even argue that when it is blatant like that law practicing licences should be revoked and the higher management of the company jailed for attempted extortion.

Fuck software patents. You don’t have to make anything - it’s not a specific mechanism - it’s just claiming an idea.

With real patents, tiny workarounds are treated as completely different. Nintendo’s sturdy and reliable d-pads from the Game & Watch through the N64 used a hollow cross pivoting atop a dome. Some years later, Sega put the dome on the cross and had it pivot on a divot.

That sort of silly bullshit distinction is endemic to mechanical design patents. But I only know one case where it happened in software patents, and it’s why image and video codecs are such a clusterfuck. IBM patented arithmetic coding - assigning short codes to frequent values. JPEG and ZIP software had to dance around this for decades, by using Huffman coding, which does the same god damn thing, but slightly worse. When the patent finally expired and ultranerds were free to improve on arithmetic coding, Google tried doing the same bullshit with their improvements, which is part of why JPEG XL went nowhere.

And that’s for hard math! I had to sit and think about describing what arithmetic coding even does, instead of instinctively explaining how to balance binary trees. Namco infamously patented the idea of minigames during load screens. Any minigame! And then they used it, like, once. Warner patented the idea of hyping any NPC that beats you, so you won’t be allowed to do that until 2033. Nintendo’s trying to patent the parts of Pokemon they copied off Megami Tensei.

Imagine if Nintendo had patented sidescrollers. How many games would not exist, if they decided to own that concept? No iteration, no competition, just a handful of Marios and the worst Zelda. The very first third-party example would be Braid. A whole genre, wiped out, because a piece of paper says going left to right is theft.

For those unfamiliar, Rothschild has a lot of patents and has a habit of going after various companies to try and get money out of them. They even tried to sue GNOME, as just one appropriate example here

I am fine with them getting valved out of these criminal tactics you know.

common Valve W

Thank you for sharing.

But with steam we can still wish for more, a DRM-free licenses push would be very welcome but not gonna happen if we dont be vocal as their kings in “customer is king” philosophy