Doom3world

In a perfect, altruistic world, patents would not be needed. In this world, however, companies need to protect their investment. If company A invests 50 million € in the development of a new drug / medicine / software, it wants to also gain money for their investment. Without patents, company B could just copy the product for a small amount of money and sell it for even less. I agree that the laws behind a patent are wrong and should be corrected /adjusted (i.e. allow use for non-commercial purposes, ensure delivery of products everywhere, price caps/limits so that people are not ripped off), but companies should also be allowed to protect their products, otherwise no one would invest in R&D anymore and the (technical) evolution of mankind would stall.

you got this totally wrong. shared knowledge don't lead to no knowledge but to far greater knowledge. that's the reason open source software has come this far. copiying allows you to grow form that point, and as you've coppied before company A would the grow from whatever point you left the studied thing.
then the idea of "product" becomes the problem. as the idea of "selling" becomes also the problem. share is the future.

Without patents Google would just take whatever your idea is and whatever product you spent your life on developing it, copy it and then offer it for free to shower more advertising... wait - they're already doing that and don't give a damn at all about ip unless the hurt counterparty is large enough to sue them. Ask how the authors of 15 million books feel that google is taking their work and scan it to make it all available for free? Court ruled them to stop years ago, but since that ruling they did scan 6 million more books to voilate the rights of the authors on purpose. How would you feel when someone just gets into your house, steals everything and then claims "we have a website - it says we do no evil on there, you must be wrong then trying to cling to your rights or income which we think should be ours".

It's the ultimate hypocracy when people on D3W contest the idea about copyrights while being insanely protective about a map of their own might get "copied" or "stolen" by other mod "authors". I well remember the outcry of "professional" hobbyist mappers who found themselves unable to distribute their "work" in a secure, protected, binary compiled format so others cannot look into it.

If I would go to another web forum and post more than three links pointing to D3W for a problem solution (one of these "look here, that's the script you need" answers) I'd get banned for "advertising" and "stealing users" while in return the same people come here and get encouraged to post links to whatever outside resource (usually their own site) as long as it's helpful.

I think patents by themselves are a very good thing.
Patents on extremely generalized routines like "1click buy" or "swipe to unlock" always feel like submitting "use eyeball to see" or "blink gesture to moisturize eyball" routines to me - just plain wrong.

JC could have gotten a patent for his shadow calculation just to potect it against proprietary use so he could open source his engine to his liking. It's not as if a patent needs to get monetized - no, quite the opposite. You can use it to keep things free.

Patent laws were not made with software or time travel in mind - they were made to prevent the guy next door to simply copy your work and undercut you on price till you file for bankruptcy (the new meaning of "to google someone") without sitting down and coming up with some good idea yourself. Therefore it's mostly meant to protect the small guy from getting outbullied by the big corporation. However it's pretty hard nowadays to do anything without running into tiny micropatents that seemingly protect some distant workroutine of whatever bigger you work on (swipe to unlock comes to mind again).

Having no patents at all would result in all ideas getting stolen and abused by the big corporations because they can leverage each and every talented inventor out of business. And ontrary to popular belief it's not everyones dream to get rich by selling out a good idea to a behemoth size company.

we're just used to patents being the norm.

i think the world would go on just fine if we didn't have them.

think about it. if an "invention" is so easily copied and reproduced, then how valuable can it really be?

[quote="BloodRayne" Patents should be banned and fought with all vigour, they belong among the darkest aspects and distortions of capitalism, which in it's base is based on betterment for mankind as a whole, the best way to govern a society and it's economy. Patents are perversion of what capitalism stands for.[/quote]

i agree. we need to step out of our brainwashed minds and see economics in a new light.

humanity IS NOT advancing. sure, technology might be, but humanity in many ways is moving backwards.

of course everything is centered around material wealth. that's the wrong perspective to have, imo. instead of "what's in it for me" we should be thinking "what's in it for me AND my community".

in all seriousness. after food, shelter, health & relationships, what else do you need? NOTHING! we only think we need more, but that's a bottomless blackhole that will never be filled. our satisfaction should be derived from helping our neighbors, not from material goods that have an expiration date. helping others on the other hand can have an impact for eternity.

i have idea how humankind has made it this far...

I'm with bloodrayne on this one.



I thought google only scanned 10% of the book as is legal under "fair use".

The idea of a patent is to grant the inventor a limited monopoly on their invention, just long enough so that they can get it to market before competitors can steal it and get it to market. What we see now is a complete perversion of the original intent, corporations building up huge "patent libraries", waiting until someone brings something to market and then suing them for infringement. How is this contributing to innovation in any way? Its all just lawyers suing sawyers. See: Samsung vs Apple in "yes we can patent rounded text boxes".

Like creative. This is really a no brainer guys. Creative is an audio device company for gods sake, how many games have they made? Carmack came up with the exact same idea a few months later, but creative waited until the game was almost released and basically blackmailed them into including EAX. "Or we'll sue your asses."

Now excuse me, I'm off to patent binary, the wheel, and the number pi.

Damn, sawyers. Always infringing on patents.

Hahahah. Lawyers will hack you up and feed you to the dogs though. I confuse the two sometimes.

I think it's about high time for me to stay away from these forums for a while. Ignorance seems to be contagious and spreading fast.

Very valuable. The value does not lay primarly within the complexity of recreation, it's what you try to recreate. This is why an invention is worth to get protected by a patent.
Ever heard of Penicillin?

The courts says otherwise.



Samsung is manufacturing the parts for Apple and then, like a miracle, comes out with an identical looking product "out of nowhere" - would you give a manufacturer all your research & design so he can simply use your own design to compete with you? Is that innovation in what - better theft?
Like Google sits on Apples board with access to all confident information and then - coincidentally comes out with Android after the iPhone got released...

Competition is good, especially competition on quality - competition on price is disastrous for the consumer. Only competition on quality leads to innovation, this unless price is a quality by itself.

it's very funny you link a picture from Doom3maps.de - they banned me for providing help on their forums, in some instances with links and then they claimed I'm the very source of illegally obtained game content of idtech4 - so much about having contact with lawyers.

Sorry for that. I just googled "Doom 3 sawyer" to get a pic.

Not the same.

All you need is a binding contract between the two parties.



.

An identical looking product? You mean something with a touch screen that makes calls? Are you suggesting that apple should have a monopoly on things with touch screens that make calls? I fail to see how the explosion of smartphones is bad for the consumer. Its strange you pick this example because for me this just illustrates why the whole concept of "intellectual property" is bizarre.

People don't pluck ideas out of thin air and then make them. Especially when it comes to consumer electronics. Things are made in iterations, with each incarnation of an idea improving successively on the last. The iphone was hot shit when it came out, now we have phones with other features that have improved on the idea that are arguably better. Also the price has come down. Everyone wins.

Also on the books thing, as a writer I personally hope google steals my book. I hope it steals it and spreads it all over the internet, where everyone can read it. After all as a writer I want people to read my work, and would find it unethical to forcibly stop people from reading (extortion) which is essentially the job of publishers in the age if infinitely duplicable information. Frankly I hope the publishers die out and take their obsolete business model with them. This is the era of democratized access to information.

Update 3 hours ago:



http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/
(sorry, but I don't know how to link directly to tweet )

edit: finally found this well-hidden feature
http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/sta ... 2519792640

++ great post

Ah no problem at all - I just found it so incredibly funny to see the name of this website popping up in a conversation that handles the protection of properties,respectively as I have learned the un-protection of properties that happens to be the new protection.

but there is also, producers that reap off the developers, and editors who exploit the writers, the same with cinema. patents mantain in part that kind of situation. google says anyone now can distribute now, therfore a new way to distribution is valid, the sharing way. I might want to be copied. I might want to be distributed by others than me, because I might want an increase on the knowledge from others about my work.

or not. then I would patent it.
but then...

the problem comes when patenting is the only way, and the other way is seen as illegal, then you star paying taxes for dvd's and for printers... etc. or could face a cut on your internet because you've done something "ilegal". to me is more illegal and inmoral to ask for taxes impliying that the use will be ilegal, there is something called presumption of inocence.

also I feel there is an hipocresy going on here... wasn't illegal to download the doom3 alpha? yet still look what developement and knowledge did com form it, and we all downloaded it and moded it.

When bringing in analogies about books and films, we need to remember that there's a difference between a copyright/trademark and a patent.