this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Fuck software patents.
Copyright made sense when it was a decade or two. Industrial patents seem basically functional. Trademark's mostly truth-in-advertising for consumer choice.
But software patents aren't about how you do something - they're claiming the entire concept, in the broadest possible terms, and killing it. Straight-up murdering that potential. It is denied the necessary iterative competition that turns dogshit first implementations into must-have features. Nobody's gonna care in twenty years.
Entire hardware form-factors have come and gone in a single decade. Can you imagine if swipe keyboards were still single-vendor, and still worked like in 2009? Or maybe Apple bought them, and endlessly bragged about how Android can't do [blank], because fifty thousand dollars changed hands in the 3G era.
How many games would not exist, if Nintendo had decided they own sidescrollers? A whole genre, wiped out, because a piece of paper says those mechanics are theft.
In fact, I'd go so far as to encourage copying others. Not plagiarising outright, as in claiming it as your own, but taking a concept and doing it yourself.
"Oh that game is just a copy of Animal Crossing."
You think you can make a better Animal Crossing? Go for it. Let me decide who did it better and which one I wanna play.
Stardew Valley was totally, unquestionably copying harvest moon. And its fantastic.
It's not just that, it deliberately copied Harvest Moon. Eric Barone (Concerned Ape) even said so
Yes someone did exactly this: it's called "Dinkum" and it's fantastic, much better than the Animal Crossing game that hit the Switch.
Iteration is innovation.
Even combining existing ideas can explore and refine a genre.
This is why loading screens don't have mini games BTW. As if you needed another reason to hate software patents.