Winning move from Epic. Showing what should be done for abandoned games. Give it back to the people so it can continued to be enjoyed by the community that will continue to care for it.
There’s literally no reason not to do that. The game has long since made money and keeping it out of public ownership is now not doing anyone any favors.
UT2004 Onslaught is still the best game mode ever btw. Haven’t played in a long while but like ten years ago there were still a good number of servers around. Not enough players for the big maps, though, those need like 20 people per team and good luck convincing a server full of deathmatch players to play as teams.
The agreement wasn’t made with the Internet Archive but with OldUnreal so that they can distribute an installer that automatically downloads the games.
But hopefully it can be expanded to the later games as well.
I hate that we have to live in this world where something as vital as archiving the internet is a volunteer-based operation that requires permission from copyright holders. In a better world, the Internet Archive would be an international enterprise funded by mandatory contributions from UN members, and IA would have open license to archive everything. Maybe they wouldn’t allow regular users to access archived items that have active copyright, unless the items become inaccessible.
I go back and forth on this. Clearly there are downsides to a service being provided by a government agency. But someone has to be in charge of it, and every option has downsides. Obviously a for-profit private venture is the WORST option. The current system of volunteer/nonprofit is great, but lacking in stability, funds, and power to push back against copyright. You could argue that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, I just think it would be nice if my tax dollars supported vital services like Internet Archive or Wikipedia.
The three patents—all filed in Japan between May and July 2024—draw similarities between Palworld and 2022’s 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus specifically. Their descriptions concern game mechanics like “riding an object” or throwing a ball to capture and possess a character in virtual spaces.
Wait…so the patents didn’t even exist when Palworld was released into EA? or am I missing something?
You’re not, but there’s a preexisting patent, and these three are basically extensions of that patent.
Essentially, Palworld needed to know what supplementary patents Nintendo was going to file in the future in Japan so they didn’t run afoul of the patent from the past. You know, textbook legal psychic stuff, really. /s
I hope Nintendo hurts itself in its confusion as its lawyers flail before the Japanese courts.
Counterpoint: both of those ideas being patented meant no competitor could use them while the ideas were relevant. And in both cases, the patenting company made like one promising example of the patented idea and then barely used it after that. Wouldn’t it have been better for consumers if we could have had loading screen minigames back when long loading screens were still relevant?
it’s like the first person invent a way to make the pop cap for your travel coffee mug. Like, anyone could have come up with that idea, right? compare to screw cap we used to have. We do have plenty of examples where the patent aren’t really popular until after it is expired or irrelevant.
Like, yeah, in a heatlhy competition env, it is way better for consumer in the beginning. But because of how capital works, eventually without patent it all goes to the bigger corps.
For the consumer, obviously.
Patents exist to protect the profit of the inventor, specifically because once you have spent the RnD money to make something, someone else can take your finished idea and create your thing without having to cover those costs. Their entire point is to make sure stuff stays more expensive and exclusive for longer.
But the issue isn’t that patents or even software patents exist as a thing, they are important to protect against copying, it’s that seemingly almost anything no matter how simple, vague or universal it is can apply and get patented, and whoever owns those patents then doesn’t have to use or license them, instead they just sit on them waiting to strike with a lawsuit.
I think software patents should really only apply to extremely tricky algorithmic “discoveries” (which I would consider inventions, as someone that’s written a SHA256 implementation from reference material, nobody is “just coming up with that”).
“Ingenuity patents” like that loading screen game are everything that’s wrong with software patents. It’s not all that crazy of an idea to add a game while waiting to play the main game. There’s no radical research required there, just an idea.
I don’t think vague ideas like “a game in a loading screen” are sufficiently creative to warrant a patent.
The thing is, many physical patents are also describing extremely simple mechanisms or mere ideas for them. I don’t think your criteria reflect reality, as much as I wish they did.
for practical physical good, some times a patent just means I did this first doesn’t mean it’s hard to do or replicate. ie. like the umbrella wedge/spring to make it open automatically. That’s the part of ingenuity. And why I think the mini game during loading screen worth the patent.
I don’t like algorithm patent because ultimately, it was there, if original sha hash wasn’t developed, someone would come up with a different method that doing roughly the same. It’s the math and other prior foundation in computer hasing/data processing provides the idea and how you can process and get the hash fast. so your newer arrangement of faster version(like different sorting algorithm) would not be possible without those other research.
ie. for my own example, my thesis involves doing polygon culling strategy, my base algorithm is totally base on math prediction as to what’s the optimum I can achieve minimum culling checks. BUT, that algorithm is actually slower than when you implement the checks base on how GPU is doing the render plus cache efficiency. If I did not know or not aware how computer works from prior study, I can’t figure out why my “optimum” algorithm is actually slower than sub-optimum checking strategy.
Say, what if SHA or whatever algorithms is implemented, and is actually very impactful to other application, which can be proven that anyone can naturally come to this conclusion by doing their own research, simply grant that patent impedes future development. Another computer graphic patent is the Joe Alter hair distribution, it has nothing to do with ingenuity and just because his dad is a good patent lawyer, it blocks any healthy competition from selling CG hair grooming product in US. If you check the patent itself, that was like trying to patent a math distribution over surface.
like the umbrella wedge/spring to make it open automatically.
That to me is a very specific algorithm. It’s a simple mechanism but putting it together might be a bit tricky.
That’s very similar to SHA, it’s a fairly simple set of mechanisms but the actual composure of those ideas into something that works as well as SHA does takes very specific research experience. It’s not at all an abstract idea, it’s a very concrete and specific set of operations that you invented first.
Imagine if the patent was “an umbrella can open itself with the push of button” no further details. That’s close to the level of detail some software patents are argued at and effectively what the “put a game in your loading screen” patent was awarded on.
You can’t patent the idea that “an umbrella should be able to open [somehow]” so I likewise think it’s ridiculous that someone was able to parent “your game [somehow] runs another simpler game before it runs.”
Patents should be to protect very specific research so that the private sector can do said research and profit from it. Patents should not block out broad concepts. The patent in the video game situation was and should’ve been ruled as bogus. It’s not the type of thing anyone needed to research or think about, you just literally go “what if I added a game to my loading screen” and you’re in violation.
The Namco(which I wrongly attribute to Konami) thing “is” very specific. Remember during that time there are not a lot multi core processors. It requires clever scheduling to allow running both the mini-game AND checking loading status to seamlessly transition into game. It’s really not just a simple “concept” but ingenuity to arrange your loading I/O wait time into running their past game at the same time. That’s in PS1 era where loading wait time because of CD-ROM and later DVD was very significant.
Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason.
In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.
Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.
If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.
The problem is a hash algorithm is exactly the sort of thing that copyright would be horrible at protecting. The source code is hardly relevant at all, it’s the operations that matter.
A big part of patents is to allow private sector research to occur. RCA failed and maybe patents should just fail too.
Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason.
You absolutely can patent “math” (well, more like physics) IRL. What matters though is that the invention actually has to be novel and non-obvious, and IMO it should also be harder to patent if it’s in a segment like software where costs of development, iteration and “research” are generally extremely cheap. Like, it should have a way higher bar for the “novelness”.
And I would not allow any kind of software design patent (use copyright or trademark to protect that).
The three patents—all filed in Japan between May and July 2024—draw similarities between Palworld and 2022’s 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus specifically. Their descriptions concern game mechanics like “riding an object” or throwing a ball to capture and possess a character in virtual spaces.
the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) which claimed preservation supporters like the VGHF “[did] not propose a clear requirement to know who the users are or why they want to access a game.” Likewise, it suggested those lack of requirements meant supporters aimed to “reserve almost complete discretion in how they would provide access to preserve[d] games.”
Stingy. You fucks don’t make money with it anymore.
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