Software patents are f***ing evil

[greggh]

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-g ... 00022.html

Hi folks,

I hate for my first post to this mailing list to be a depressing one,
but I need to pass along some bad news.

Due to patent concerns, we won't be able to include any games in Fedora
which meet the following criteria:

A game where "targets" move across the screen to a predetermined point
or line, where the player hits a button/key/mouse click as the target(s)
crosses that point or line, and gets points.

This means:

No "Guitar Hero" clones.
No "Dance Dance Revolution" clones.

I need your help to make sure that we don't have any other games that
meet this criteria, either on the wish list or in Fedora.

If you're not sure, ask me.

Thanks in advance,

~spot

[allix]

Surely thats a joke?

[Tsuroerusu]

Surely thats a joke?

This is no game! (Pun intended)

[Wally Balljacker]

Aww, no more Frets of Fire?

[greggh]

Free Software Magazine just did an article about this.

Red Hat packagers dance around frivolous music game software patents

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/col ... re_patents

So, with that understanding, let’s have a look at this “brilliant innovation” that is bugging Red Had, and see if it’s really worth the tax dollars we’re spending to “protect” it from being used. Here’s the essence of the patent, as described by Tom Calloway of Red Hat, on the Fedora Games list:

A game where “targets” move across the screen to a predetermined point or line, where the player hits a button/key/mouse click as the target(s) crosses that point or line, and gets points.

That’s it.

No, I’m serious. That’s it.

Of course, there’s probably lots of prior art on this, so it’s hard to believe this even got accepted. Until you see the actual patents, of course. I think this is meant to be covered by Konami’s US patent #6450888 dating from September 2002, although Calloway indicated US patent #6347998 from February 2002. In any case, both show what empty snow jobs patents are nowadays.

So not only are we paying out special privileges to corporate proprietary software producers, but we are doing it for trivial ideas that anyone would easily come up with, and those ideas aren’t even written down clearly, but are instead specifically designed to be hard to review. I guess the conventional wisdom is that if you gunk up your writing enough, the USPTO examiners will be too lazy to read it and just rubber stamp the patent (which is exactly what seems to happen).


And the dance begins

As soon as something like this gets mentioned, people in the community start the time-wasting activity of trying to figure out whether anybody bothered to publish this particular obvious idea out of the millions of other obvious ideas in the world. One poster vaguely recalls having written prior art code “in the fourth grade” in the 1980s. Another recalls a Commodore 64 game that seemed to fit the bill. Nitpicks ensue about whether the particular examples exactly fit (Why so much specifity about the prior art when the claims are so broad, I cannot say).

Finally, either somebody will find by good fortune that something covered was published earlier (please remember that Konami is supposed to prove to the USPTO before filing the patent that this is not so), or else perfectly good packages will just get scrubbed out of the distribution.


Enough is enough

We are forging our own shackles here.

This same dance has been undergone by project after project, as the proprietary industry has learned the truth about this absurd legal system: it provides no justice, but it can provide more power to those who already have too much. Power to retard progress and crush independent development to the detriment of the free software development community, the intellectual commons, and ultimately, the public good.

Why are we paying for that?