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ECS patent

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Wattosan, Sep 7, 2021.

  1. Wattosan

    Wattosan

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    Last edited: Sep 7, 2021
  2. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    If the person in question understands the situation correctly, it is an extremely poor move.

    If they understand the situation correctly.
     
  3. Joe-Censored

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    Unity filed for the patent in 2018, and has had the patent for over a year. People are blowing this out of proportion.

    The patent covers Unity's specific implementation of an ECS system, not all ECS systems. Any ECS design from anyone else which was created prior to this patent is under no risk, since the date when theirs was created is proof enough to fend off a lawsuit (and possibly invalidate the patent itself, so Unity would be stupid to file the lawsuit). Any ECS system which is designed substantially differently than Unity's would also be under little to no risk either.

    A patent doesn't cover an idea, only a specific implementation of an idea. Design a system with the same idea, but designed differently, and you should be fine. Also, as far as I've seen, Unity doesn't have a very active legal department. Seems like a bunch of fear mongering.
     
  4. Ryiah

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    Just skimming through the patent it appears that it's much more than just a patent for ECS. Figure 7A shows a system that translates a Game Object into an Entity with one or more Components. Other than that the patent merely describes their one implementation.

    Some people are quick to call doom and gloom over this but you would be surprised how many software patents exist. Below is a patent for "command line output redirection". Best part is if you follow the references there are even more related to the subject like providing command line apps with data access.

    https://patents.justia.com/patent/8739122
     
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2021
  5. Neto_Kokku

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    Just protection against patent trolls, I guess.
     
  6. hippocoder

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    So what? is my answer.

    If it's evil it'll get revoked in court one day. If not, then not.
     
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  7. neginfinity

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    That's very optimistic.
     
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  8. CasperK

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    Would be nice If they'd actually implement it correctly before trying to protect it. Guess people having it working got a good defense.
     
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  9. frosted

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    Most software patents are total BS.

    Amazon had a f'n patent on "one click ordering" that was in effect till pretty recently...

    "September 12, 2017, marked the end of an era as the patent expired for Amazon’s “1-Click” button for ordering. The idea that consumers could enter in their billing, shipping and payment information just once and then simply click a button to buy something going forward was unheard of when Amazon secured the patent in 1999"

    That patent was completely absurd when it was granted. Unity definitely has a shot getting theirs.
     
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  10. Joe-Censored

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    If you're going to file for a patent, it is typically done prior to publicly releasing the product, even an early version.
     
  11. hippocoder

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    Maybe your idea of evil is unproven then.
     
  12. CasperK

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    I get what you mean but then I think that they'd do that before announcing their roadmap, or maybe somewhere inbetween and not after they'd fail to meet them. Especially after I saw what happened with Entities, DOTS audio and Tiny.

    Pretty sure they had those thing planned before going public.
     
  13. Deadlines and patents have nothing to do with each other. Patents aren't released products, they are description of implementation. Nothing more. I don't see any valid points in this argument.
     
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  14. CasperK

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    Guess I'm just pessimistic its not that close to to public release yet. But would love to be proven wrong soooo much.
     
  15. Ryiah

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  16. neginfinity

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    I don't believe in good or evil.

    However a company would absolutely be able to create a harmful patent and sit on it until it expires with legal system doing nothing about it. That's why I said it is optimistic. As it sounded as if you assume that legal system will right the wrong.

    No offense intended in any form, by the way.

    The situation is very unclear, to be honest.
     
  17. CasperK

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    True. Guess just meant the actuall implementation at this point. Patent got filed way earlier. Just that they are at the point where they are totally reevaluating their process to even create it. Not sure how much it will even follow it at this point, cause they've been mostly silent on that for a while now.
     
  18. CasperK

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    Some famous ones come to mind.
    5,718,632 minigames during loading screens.
    6,200,138 Arrow above the character pointing to the goal.
    4,687,200 A cross shaped d-pad.
     
  19. Enzi

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    Not the ECS news I was hoping for.
     
  20. Wattosan

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    I have mixed feelings about patents.

    On one hand it makes sense that the inventor of whatever is described in the patent, is able to use their invention for profit they rightfully deserve.
    On the other hand if you disallow others to use your invention to benefit the end clients/consumers, you are possibly holding a good thing away from some people who'd experience that with someone else's product, not the inventors. And depending on whatever is patented, its further development (be it a technology or creative work) is possibly slowed down because of a restrictive patent.

    I mean if a really good game mechanic, that works in RPGs for example, is created and really works, why shouldn't other games copy and use that. For example, imagine that someone patented a save/load system, prohibiting others from using a similar system in their game. If this was the case, it would have a negative effect on the whole gaming industry as it would possibly keep the quality of the games low or would simply make developers unable to create certain types of games (imagine playing Witcher 3 where if you die you start from the beginning).
     
  21. andyz

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    hmm patents on software architecture or simple systems = nonsense surely..?!
    patents on algorithms - well ok, creator needs income. Just a bit annoying until they run out! See superformula (expired, but not before No Man's Sky accused of using), simplex noise (patent for some uses, expiring next year)
     
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  22. neoshaman

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    Simplex at least he didn't patent the original perlin noise, he only patented an optimization, ie we had alternative from the same guy that worked just fine.
     
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  23. Joe-Censored

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    Yeah filing patents ahead of their IPO makes sense, whether they are really useful or not.

    They touted their patent numbers at the time in their SEC filings:
    https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000119312520227862/d908875ds1.htm
     
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  24. AlanMattano

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    I give Unity the idea to run all the game on the CPU cache...
    If it was invented before then there is no problem; The court will declare the patent nullification.
     
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  25. hippocoder

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    If this is the case then Arowx will hold most of the digital world's prior art!
     
  26. hippocoder

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    Ramble:

    Seriously, my stance is: software patents suck. The reason they suck is the nature of dev is that all solutions inevitably will be found. What we are doing is inventing inside everyone else's inventions. On the shoulder of giants doesn't even begin to cover this. In fact AI will probably be able to optimise most outcomes.

    Take the GPU community? nobody would achieve ANYTHING without sharing work. Also "Carmack's Reverse" - another example of how vile patents can be. Carmack happily coded doing what he did very well, yet a corp had to file a patent on something he already concurrently invented.

    I'd warrant that in software, we are discovering solutions, not inventing them, because in a lot of cases the solution does build itself on other solutions. There's only one real way to please hardware, and it'll be a naughty grab at SIGGRAPH that will help build this discovery.

    Such things in software haven't ever led to innovation and it seems to me the patent office is becoming rather lax with approving them.

    A shame because other countries - naming no names - have no intention, whatsoever of upholding these patents in the years to come, based on track record.

    So what value are patents? simply, they're just what businesses use to increase stock value.

    Anyone actually enforcing software patents doesn't understand software.
     
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  27. neginfinity

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    Or perhaps they do understand it, but just want to cause as much damage as possible.
     
  28. hippocoder

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    I think really it's two camps from my experience: A fair few patent squatters exist in America because that's where patents are most easily approved. They tend to go after mobile game studios and so on, and usually rely on the threat in order to get what they want. Squatters and leeches.

    On the other hand, take RAD game tools? Brilliant company, with a lot of propriety software. You could argue they deserve the many patents they filed for (not sure about successfully) but when you look closer, you find all of them, bar none, include some form of open source contribution. So no, I don't think they deserve a patent. They are protected enough with copyright.

    It seems to me the whole concept of software patents exists only to move money around, I've not really seen evidence it is anything beneficial. It certainly doesn't encourage innovation in a field like this where people would innovate just as much without patents. Because if your game is faster, you can do more. But people don't need encouragement to do that. They don't need an excuse from the patent office to do that. Because patents were invented to solve an ancient problem before the existence of computers, when there were not many humans on earth vs today.
     
  29. AcidArrow

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    I don't think legal departments understand software.
     
  30. hippocoder

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    Legal never needed to understand it, just enforce it :p
     
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  31. neginfinity

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    It is "Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?" kind of thing.

    Let's say you've spent 50 years of your life developing a strong AI. And then you've succeeded. However, the underlying principle that nobody but you could find turned out to be simple enough, and now everyone can roll their own solution, while you get nothing. Is this "fair"?

    I have a gut feeling that it isn't, and the person who broke the ice and found a new thing should get something for the effort they've spent.

    Of course, in practice people patent squares instead of getting rewarded for innovation and effort.

    For example, I do not believe that carmack's reverse is worthy of a patent. Or even Marching Cubes (this one's thankfully expired, I think). But there can be things that take a lot of effort to make for the first time and then are easy enough to duplicate once you grok the principle.
     
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  32. hippocoder

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    Patents were invented in 1449, when slavery was normal and 0.35 billion people existed. That's not a lot of people compared to 7.6 billion today. It's nothing. And it was for a glass making process that had already been used before in antiquity.

    From there it became politically motivated with larger entities gathering multiple patents to assert control.

    That does not sound like a healthy concept for this planet moving forward. Yet it is largely unchanged from 572 years ago.

    Any promise of "innovation" is a lie.

    I've focused only on England for this, but in other parts of the world, the concept of abusing a patent and patents already existed before, however much of that is sparsely documented so I focused on the easier facts to illustrate a point: Patents aren't helping progress.

    The *tiny* handful of individuals that actually benefit is far outweighed by the millions who have died because of patents, especially with diabetic medicines and more.

    https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/new...people_with_diabetes_cant_buy_generic_insulin

    upload_2021-9-9_13-31-6.png

    The death toll of patents.
     
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  33. neginfinity

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    It's not.

    There are multiple parts of the problem.

    1. If a person works their ass off for years, comes up with something amazing, but gets nothing, that's wrong and should be fixed.
    2. If a life-saving medicine is unavailable because of patent fees, that's wrong and should be fixed.
    3. If someone did nothing but earns ton of money because they stole work of another and filed a paper sooner, that's wrong and should be fixed.

    Effort and notable achievements should be rewarded, as a reward will encourage moving forward. However, the achievements and information should be available to all.

    The patent law in its current form tries to address only a part of the problem, the part where you, the iventor, should get something, and its solution to the problem is allowing the inventor to monopolize. Which is far from ideal and leads to situations like Zolgensma price tag. ("Why is this so expensive? Because we decided that's the right price for it.")
     
    Last edited: Sep 9, 2021
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  34. Joe-Censored

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    Since we've moved to the pros/cons of patents in general. Another big motivator for patents are the individual engineers themselves. It looks really good on your resume to be listed as an inventor of several patents. Companies don't want to lose those employees, and they can demand higher salaries.
     
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  35. hippocoder

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    For every amazing inventor at a large corporation, there are thousands indirectly making it possible for that amazing inventor to have that privilege.

    Put simply, I don't really respect the inventors of patents all that much. I don't think they're special, and for the most part, they're engineered.
     
  36. BIGTIMEMASTER

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    i think if we are all friends then the very idea of ownership over anything is preposterous. Ownership becomes important if we are not friends. It's how you keep enemies from taking your stuff. So then if we aren't friends but we are enemies who wants to take each others stuff and not share it freely, I don't see why we aren't just getting rid of the enemies. You know, blowing them up.

    I guess I just can't understand civilization. It's like war all the time but where all the enemies have agreed that most of the time they won't actually kill each other, but they will do everything possible to keep each other from getting what they need. It seems convoluted and stupid.

    I think all the moronic animals are actually smarter than us humans. It's pretty cut and dry for them. If friend, then help. If not friend, then kill/avoid. It makes sense and it basically works.

    Anyway, that's how I feel about patents.
     
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  37. Joe-Censored

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    I think if you started to see software companies killing employees of other software companies, you might rethink the superiority of the animal strategies :p
     
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  38. neginfinity

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    Hah.

    Let's assume you have a friend X. The friend will pay you a visit periodically, eat everything you have in your fridge, get drunk in your apartment, make a mess, puke everywhere, flip everything upside down, and then borrow your car and total it.

    At the same time, the dude is "help you move the body" type. So you can't put him as an enemy. He is a friend. But not the one you let borrow your car. Or get close to your fridge.

    Ownership exists, because people need boundaries, have different needs and different ability to acquire things.

    "Feeling stressed? Eat your children!"
    Mapping animals to humans never goes anywhere useful. They bond, but projecting it onto human friendship would be incorrect. Different species, different abilities, different needs, different psychology.
     
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  39. BIGTIMEMASTER

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    humans is animals it's not a different thing.

    ownership exist because too much food, too many people. it's the only real problem there has ever been.

    and chop off the moochers head!
     
  40. angrypenguin

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    Um, what? The number of people who benefit from medicine is not "tiny". I am unaware of a single person I know who hasn't benefited from medicine of some kind at some point of their life. For many it has been life saving, or had a massive impact on quality of life.

    And medicine is a classic example of neginfinity's concept of a thing which takes huge effort to invent / discover and then little effort to reproduce. The cost of making medicine is pretty significant, but the cost of researching it is massive. Commercially, researching it wouldn't be viable if there were no mechanism to protect the initial investment.

    I agree that the system is imperfect, and that the flaws have cost lives as compared to if it were perfect. But also take a moment to compare it to if there were no system at all.

    * Probably not on a per-unit basis once it's at scale, but definitely in terms of needing factories, trained people, supply chains, etc. to get started in the first place.

    It's far more complicated than that because it's not just friend / enemy, but a multi-dimensional array of aligned and conflicting interests.

    Even at that trivially simplistic level, though, there are many reasons for civilisation to generally work. One reason is that attempting to kill each other is mutually detrimental if you think more than one step down the causality chain. Another is that we tend to notice the issues we have with each other quite starkly, while taking the good stuff for granted and not noticing it at all... until you stop to think about it.

    But also, even if I did go full primitive brain and decide that the tax collector is my enemy, therefore instead of paying the tax I will kill him... if it's just me then it's an unwinnable conflict. If it's everyone then it's anarchy. Either way, it's much more dangerous to me than playing my part within the broader community. So it makes no sense to fight against it unless the community itself becomes destructive. And that evidently works at scale, because we've got to the point where people can do stuff like make video games.

    It's a massive topic, but I think this video game by Nicky Case is pretty enlightening.
     
  41. neginfinity

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    Actually I'm of opinion that medicine research should be probably funded by the government, resulting product shoudl be made public domain and sold at manufacturing cost.

    Basically, greed is a good driving force of progress, but in case of commercial medicine companies do not have any incentive to cure people. They have an incentive to make more sales or make imperfect cure that cures symptoms but not the disease.

    Of course, government-funded research is a whole other can of worms.
     
  42. angrypenguin

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    Yeah, I agree that a fundamentally different approach where the investing stakeholders did not measure the benefit in terms of a financial return would be a good improvement to the system.
     
  43. neginfinity

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    That game was enlgihtening. I've seen this theory before, but I've not seen anyone make it into a game form that can demonstrate the rules.
     
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  44. hippocoder

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    You have misread that. The tiny handful of *inventors* that financially gain, is outweighed by the needs of many that can benefit by the patent not protecting the innovation of the inventor. To understand this you need to read patent history. As it is today, nearly every patent benefits a corporation and the inventor benefits by recognition / salary because of that. But when you look at that, you understand why people are dying for no reason.

    Therefore, I hope you can understand that patents are costing lives. Patents do not encourage invention when humans already compete tooth and nail over every tiny thing.

    While I'm going to cut my side off on this thread (I feel it's moving away from a much less harmful patent of software) - I do think that patents are not a good thing in this world, and haven't been for half a thousand years or more.

    People file yearly to patent the most stupid things imaginable. I can't think of anything more stupid than patenting medicine. Saying it is there to recoup costs is a clear and proven lie. Google will teach you that, page after page.
     
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  45. neginfinity

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    The problem is that you cannot have inventions without an incentive to make them happen.

    The need of many does not matter if the few that can satisfy those needs are doing other things.

    Greed is a VERY good incentive. It has been driving force of progress in past two or three centuries, because capitalism is very good at exploiting greed.

    So an evil corporation, thinking about all those tasty tasty tasty profits, and driven purely by personal gain, can hire an ARMY of researches and throw huge number of money to make the research faster. Likewise, if researches are paid really well, more people will be driven into the field.

    Remove this motivation and you'll have fewer researches and fewer resources. You'll need people motivated ideologically, and you'll have a limited pool of government-allocated resources shared by all.

    Of course people die because of unfair pricing abuse of mechanics and so on.

    However some innovation wouldn't even happen in the first place, if there was no golden carrot to chase, and in case of life saving medicine, such medicine might not occur in the first place and more people could die compared to the world where a cure is expensive.

    And if prices are a concern, then pirated medicine is a thing.

    Speaking of lives, one thing that I found interesting is that number of people dying every year in the world is 55 million. 1/5th is cancer, 3/5th is cardio diseases.

    Yet I'm not seeing anyone crying their eyes out over this, as the number is too huge for a human to comprehend and far exceeds human capacity to care and emphatise. So what happens? People shove the 55 milion dead under the rug and pretend nothing is wrong. Then they feel fury over a SMALL instances of injustice, and go "aww" over small instaces of firemen saving kittens.

    Such is life, i suppose.
     
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  46. Ryiah

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    Just thought I would chime in real quick before the thread is locked my dad needed medicine for a condition he developed around a year ago. When we started discussing it with the insurance company we discovered that they wouldn't pay and that the medicine was going to be $2,000 every two weeks.

    Based off of that you would immediately think of the negatives involved in patents but where things got interesting is that we contacted the company owning the brand name of the drug (the patent holder). We asked them if there was a way to subsidize the cost of the drug. We submitted income info on request. We were told my dad qualified with the company to receive the drug completely free of charge mailed to his door.

    I'm just tossing this out there for people who think a company with a patent means an expensive medicine cannot be acquired by people who don't have the funds. It's not just my dad who has received it this way either. Once I was aware of the method I researched it and found it's been around for decades just not advertised.
     
    Last edited: Sep 10, 2021
  47. lmbarns

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    ^ I had similar, insurance didn't want to spend $750/mo, I ended up getting a paper copy of the prescription, emailed a picture to a canadian pharmacy, $130 sent UPS to my door. My mother in law is a pharmacist at a hospital and they order insulin and medications from canadian pharmacies for elderly and people paying out of pocket. And when I was in Australia it was $66/mo for the same med paying cash as a foreigner with no insurance, made by pfizer, same chemical and dose, but there's no generic version in the US while AU doesn't allow any meds that aren't generic.

    I'd also say the Mcdonald's ice cream machine lawsuit is pretty interesting, without patents they're still protected by trade secret laws and are winning in court on those grounds.
     
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  48. angrypenguin

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    Have I? I'm not seeing it. I think that we're just seeing "benefit" differently. You're thinking financially, I'm thinking overall quality of life.

    As a consumer, I benefit from patents because they have helped people to research / discover / invent stuff that makes my life better. In software / game dev the process of creating new IP is often relatively inexpensive, but there are other fields where that is far from true, and I regularly benefit from the fact that people have spent huge sums of money developing stuff that I now use, and which may never have turned a cent, and which probably would have got less investment if there was no way to protect it from competitors.

    I agree the system is flawed. I'm sure we could come up with something better. But I'm not at all convinced that it's doing more harm than good for consumers.
     
  49. zombiegorilla

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    My experience has primarily been with the protection side. At a prior company I worked at we filed for patents often. If something was believed to be significantly unique, we would attempt to patent it. As mentioned above, it is possible to file a patent where someone else hasn't and get it. If you are a significantly large company (I would count Unity as such) there are folks who make careers/businesses out of patent trolling. Large companies are constant targets for this stuff, (some of the idea being is that a big company will settle petty suits for a enough to justify the cost to bring it. On the other side, a large company doesn't really gain any by going after people based on defensive patents they have. (for run of the mill stuff). Filing and pursuing cases is expensive and a company that is successful making games (or whatever) will lose money chasing lawsuits, there is no money it. (it is a poor business model for a successful company... though it was popular in 00s) But... they also have a lot more to lose if someone successfully brings a suit against them. Defensive patents a necessary (and annoying) evil.

    I don't know that Unity is actually doing that (defensive).
     
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  50. SamOld

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    So here's a clear case for why this is bad.

    I'm working on a hobby project which is an ECS based engine. It's inspired by DOTS, although it's different technology, built in a different language, etc. It's a bit like Bevy, but not in Rust. It's also a single person's hobby project, so it's actually barely anything right now, but that's the goal.

    This isn't a commercial project, except for the possibility of building my own games in it. Although, I would like to maintain the option of releasing it in some form one day, should it ever get to that stage. It probably won't.

    I'm not studying Unity's implementation particularly closely - although I have looked at it for the purposes of writing Unity DOTS code. I'm certainly not copying it. However, it's likely that we will reach very similar conclusions about the best way to implement core concepts, because there's probably a single optimal design when you look at all of the performance requirements.

    I do, for example, have separate representations of authoring and runtime data, although my API is very different from Unity's.

    Having discovered this patent, I'm discouraged from working on this project. I don't know if this patent blocks my project, and I don't have the money to hire the lawyers to answer that question. I also don't know whether, as I iterate on the design, I might find the requirements funnelling me into a clear breach at which point I would be blocked from progressing.

    So the existence of this patent is having a chilling effect on me. There's argument in this thread that it may be defensive only, but if Unity don't make that clear, then its mere existence is offensive with regards to my project.

    I believe that a DOTS style of engine is the future, but I'm not particularly confident in Unity pulling it off well. The state of their engine is not promising. I believe that a good DOTS style engine needs to be built from the ground up, not be a messy hybrid. If Unity monopolises this design, then we may never get the competitor that we need to either replace Unity or force them to improve.

    The main Bevy dev has commented that he thinks Bevy is probably safe from this patent, but he knows of some other projects that aren't, and he calls it a "massive overstep".

    I'm pretty unhappy about this.