Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.
Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.
The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.
If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.
As much as I love many Nintendo games, their business practices are so anti-consumer. The Switch is definitely the last of their console I buy for the foreseeable future.
The problem is that the people who would write these rules are the ones making A LOT of money on the way they are written now. For them there is no need to fix it, because it ain’t broke.
The actual rules aren’t too terrible, plenty of these garbage patents would be invalidated with any real scrutiny applied to them. The problem is that it’s often cheaper to pay the settlement than the legal bill to fight, which is a more widespread problem that the legal system is too expensive and slow to be accessible to the vast majority of people. There’s also a secondary issue that patent officers are too generous in granting patents, and reform would be great. The problem is they are overworked so they can’t properly evaluate and research applications, and are encouraged to be overly permissive in granting patents.
Firstly this is surprisingly high-quality coverage. I’ve never heard of this website but I’m pretty impressed.
Secondly, regarding the lawsuit in general, I think that patent and intellectual property law regarding game mechanics and software processes in general are badly in need of reform. There doesn’t seem to have been significant legislative action to address this in any major economy that I know of. The number of bullshit parents being filed, unclear and vague rules as to how copyright/patent law works with respect to software, AI, and game mechanics, is really leading to a lawsuit culture where the only way to find out what the bounds of the law are is to spend millions of dollars on lawyers to litigate it in court, when really, legislatures should be actively writing new and clearer rules to deal with these issues before people need to sue each other to find out.
The Internet of 2025 is just way too different and complex to operate using the copyright rules of the 1990s.
If I were in writing the rules, there’d be separate categories of intellectual property for software libraries, game mechanics, fictional characters, and so on, with clear definitions on what is and is not considered fair use of these sorts of intellectual property. It should not be possible to copyright the design of a widely-used software API or game mechanic. And any such protection on those things should be comparatively short in duration (not more than a decade) so that others can eventually re-implement the design, and probably do so better than the original inventor.
As much as I love many Nintendo games, their business practices are so anti-consumer. The Switch is definitely the last of their console I buy for the foreseeable future.
I’m glad the last Nintendo console I had was the SNES. Everything else was emulated.
But good news for Nintendo, I stopped pirating their games, they’re mostly junk nowadays. (I pirated PalWorld and I’m considering to buy it.)
The problem is that the people who would write these rules are the ones making A LOT of money on the way they are written now. For them there is no need to fix it, because it ain’t broke.
10 years is way too much, I’d go with 5.
The actual rules aren’t too terrible, plenty of these garbage patents would be invalidated with any real scrutiny applied to them. The problem is that it’s often cheaper to pay the settlement than the legal bill to fight, which is a more widespread problem that the legal system is too expensive and slow to be accessible to the vast majority of people. There’s also a secondary issue that patent officers are too generous in granting patents, and reform would be great. The problem is they are overworked so they can’t properly evaluate and research applications, and are encouraged to be overly permissive in granting patents.