At 22:34 -0500 1/21/03, Martin L. Shoemaker wrote: [technical innovation patent example. snip.]
However, it seems to me like you're comparing apples and oranges. You cite an example patent--but patents are *designed* to protect ideas. It's copyright that doesn't give a damn about ideas. If a game company wants to operate under the rules of patent, that's fine by me (is it still 17 years, max, from date of creation/public revelation, and you have to apply right away?). Now, i haven't seen any RPG mechanics that i think merit a patent--but then i don't think M:tG merits a patent, nor some of the mathematical algorithms that have been patented. At least it's abusing the right law, if it is abuse. It's any claims that *copyright* would prevent you making, say, a scenario for a game that put a burr in my britches.Now in some sense, all I did was apply multivariate regressions to a great big pile of data that had been massaged according to known laws of color science. You could argue that, like "2+2=4", these correlations were always out there, waiting to be discovered. But I would disagree. I was there, and this "idea" took a lot of sweat and effort to produce. If that correlation was "always there", well, then, so are the laws of physics, and we should throw out any patent that simply leverages them to produce a result. And after a lot of back-and-forth, the patent office agreed with us. So I think that it's fair to say that sometimes, an idea represents creative work deserving of some IP protection. The big RPG publishers have contended in the past that their rules and the particular expressions thereof fall into this realm, and have argued that there are no definitive statutes nor court cases settling this issue, only opinions from the copyright office.
Interesting essay on the radio recently (ATC or To the Best of Our Knowledge, within the last week), arguing against the extensions of copyright (both in duration and coverage), because of what they're doing to libraries, and pointing out that copyright and patent were originally constructed specifically to balance the needs of society with those of the individual--granting a limited monopoly to the creator, in order to foster creation, while keeping it limited, in order that creation would ultimately benefit all of society. I'm right there with that one, so i'll continue to fight expansive interpretations because i think they're bad for society--even when i'm te "beneficiary," as the creator.Given the tendency of the Congress and the courts lately to view IP in an expansive light, their contention might well stand a court battle.
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Oh, and i misspoke (in the post that you quoted, and i snipped): i should've said that a d20-substitute is an idea, and has nothing to do with copyright one way or the other, but *might* have something to do with patent, if either the original or the new method was sufficiently innovative.
--
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