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.”
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.
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 the person who created it cannot profit from it, then nobody should be able to.
I think most artists would agree.
Whose law? Whose enforcers? The Internet is fundamentally incompatible with traditional sovereignty and jurisdiction concepts