SEED and The Software Patents (Posted : 18/10/2010)
Good Day.
As a students and people interested in the field of Information Technologies (IT), we heard some time ago something that we found to be interesting and curious: The Patent of the "One-Click Buy" from Amazon . This matter unleashed a great controversy for it was, and maybe it still is, the clearest example of one of the biggest obstacles to all who are involved in Software Development and Digital Entertainment Industries: Software Patents.
There are many and well documented analysis, presentations, articles and other information in "The Web" on this matter, simply type: Software Patents, onto Google to get more than a million results. The following is simply a reflection of the way in which SEED is facing this issue, what are its implications for us and the actions we intend to follow to deal with this aspect of the industry in which we have entered.
As part of the promotion of our project (a game of the PUZZLE genre ) we got a video on YouTube in which we showed the first "playable" version of it. Since its planning, we knew the mechanics of the game we were developing was already well known and had been used at least a couple of times, this project was going to be our own version of a classic game of the SNES / Famicom : Tetris Attack.
Thanks to a comment from one of the users, we began an investigation into the possible consequences of this "re-make." At first we thought that the legal conflict could arise only if we used the same characters, perhaps this thinking was quite innocent and uninformed from our part. It is understandable, and perfectly valid from our point of view, that both the name of "Yoshi" (c) and his/her appearance , his world and his friends to have "Copyright", but what we couldn't imagine is that, the Whole Concept and Gameplay of a PUZZLE game was, not only copyrighted, but protected by a software patent, as can be read HERE.
The purpose of a patent is to protect those who invested time, effort and money in research, development and implementation of a solution as it is understood that a patent should promote innovation and protect those who attain it. According to what we have read so far, that solution must be novel and not obvious to be capable of being patented, apparently the dynamics of this particular PUZZLE was both novel and non obvious.
There are people more qualified than us to discuss whether software patents are fulfilling their function, or even if they should exist or not, the fact is that a patent confers a monopoly on the exploitation of an idea for 20 years, which in the particular field of IT is almost equivalent to a century, because this field is quite dynamic.
It is perfectly possible for a giant like Google to "fight" with another giant like Oracle to defend their use, for instance, of technologies based on Java, given that it has the legal and financial resources to do so, but it is clear that if we continued with our approach of using a "Gameplay" which is "Patented" Square-Enix could crush us without serious efforts.
So, for us at SEED this was an aspect fairly well known but distant until a few days ago. Given the above, SEED has stopped it's development on this project, and has begun the search for a new way of implementing our PUZZLE project, for if we have continued our intend to use and trade with our "original" concept, the product could have face serious legal problems, whose consequences need resources we do not have at the present time.
We will try to overcome this new difficulty, according to our current capabilities, in the best way possible. Clearly this fact has forced a further delay and at the same time forced us to develop our own innovative and non-obvious solution, we hope to live up to the challenge. It appears that the consensus of many experts is that these patents should be eliminated completely, because in fact they tend to limit, rather than promote, the development of the industry.
Finally, if among the readers of this reflection there is a person, or a group, interested in participate on the IT market, we suggest you try to be well informed before you do anything to take your first step into this, because it seems that all those interested in participating in this industry are walking in a truly minefield.
