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[Jul 28, 2004, 10:44 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

A post to the Beyond3D Forums (thanks ASLayerAODsk) follows-up on news that id Software has made a deal for shadow technology that will be used in DOOM 3 (story). The article offers the site's disapproval of patents in general and expresses some skepticism about the legitimacy of Creative's claims, but the accompany quote from John Carmack positions this all as a matter of practicality:

The patent situation well and truly sucks.

We were prepared to use a two-pass algorithm that gave equivalent results at a speed hit, but we negotiated the deal with Creative so that we were able to use the zfail method without having to actually pay any cash. It was tempting to take a stand and say that our products were never going to use any advanced Creative/3dlabs products because of their position on patenting gaming software algorithms, but that would only have hurt the users.

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83.

Re: what fucking Books vs Movies

Jul 28, 2004, 18:58

Awesome Spume

...is there some problem with the nForce 3...? The Nforce 3 HAS 5.1 sound (hell, maybe 7.1) but won't do Dolby Digital. I think that's been the main sticking point with Nforce fans. There aren't many DD games yet and they're system intensive but over the next few months it'll be an issue. I'm waiting. The guy, (Flip?) who questioned what state the games industry would be in if people had been patenting coding techniques years back hit the nail on the head. It is going to happen. Apparently the US has 300,000 patent applications a year and 3000 patent officers so prior use searches just aren't happening with any kind of thoroughness. It rests on someone with an issue with the patent (or patent application) to go out of their way to prove prior use. This can end up in million dollar lawsuits so it favours the bigger corps. There's a growing trend in patent lawyers spotting an internet business practise, patenting the process and then hitting websites or companies using the technology for licensing fees. So it's either license or lawsuit. Effectively what SCO is attempting right now with Linux. EDIT: here we go, a BBC Online news story about patents and the Internet: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3920793.stm This comment was edited on Jul 28, 19:02.

Subject

Comment [quote="Awesome Spume"Jul 28, 2004, 18:58]i[...is there some problem with the nForce 3...?]i The Nforce 3 HAS 5.1 sound (hell, maybe 7.1) but won't do Dolby Digital. I think that's been the main sticking point with Nforce fans. There aren't many DD games yet and they're system intensive but over the next few months it'll be an issue. I'm waiting. The guy, (Flip?) who questioned what state the games industry would be in if people had been patenting coding techniques years back hit the nail on the head. It is going to happen. Apparently the US has 300,000 patent applications a year and 3000 patent officers so prior use searches just aren't happening with any kind of thoroughness. It rests on someone with an issue with the patent (or patent application) to go out of their way to prove prior use. This can end up in million dollar lawsuits so it favours the bigger corps. There's a growing trend in patent lawyers spotting an internet business practise, patenting the process and then hitting websites or companies using the technology for licensing fees. So it's either license or lawsuit. Effectively what SCO is attempting right now with Linux. EDIT: here we go, a BBC Online news story about patents and the Internet: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3920793.stm [/quote]

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[Jul 28, 2004, 10:44 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments