The Gaming Den

Previn wrote:I find it hard to believe that Cryptozoic didn't know what it was doing and in fact actually planned knowing full well that what they were doing was legally questionable on a good day.

No one on the planet is confused about whether or not Mario clones (i.e. 2d platformers) are on shaky legal ground. Even if the screen scrolls with the character. Even if you can only go left, right, jump, and duck. Even if you die in one hit. Even if you have multiple lives. Even if there's a bunch of powerups.

No one on this planet is confused about whether or not Doom clones (i.e. FPS's) are on shaky legal ground. Even if you have a 100 life. Even if there's armor. Even if you both have pistols, shotguns, and rocket launchers. Even if your pistol also has 15 rounds in it. Even if there's a bunch of pickups.

WotC is attempting to patent a genre. You might be able to argue that it created the genre (or you might argue that they didn't, and instead M;tG is just an incremental derivation of previous works in the same way Hex is an incremental derivation of M;tG); if so, good for it. That's nice. But it's still a gross overreach of patent law for the explicit purpose of bullying competition out of the genre in order to create and maintain an artificial monopoly.

To be fair copyright law generally demands that you defend your copyright or you lose it. So any time WOTC thinks that they have a case that a jury might find reasonable, they pretty much *have* to release the hounds. If they don't defend copyright vigorously enough someone can come along, make a flat out clone of Magic, and then claim copyright lapsed because WOTC didn't defend their copyright and that would be at the very least a court battle that WOTC doesn't want.

The patent shit? *Shrugs* Early in a lawsuit like this you throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

If someone did put out a straight Magic clone, would it even matter? WOTC has literal decades of advantage building their brand and managing all the relevant issues.

TheFlatline wrote:To be fair copyright law generally demands that you defend your copyright or you lose it.

Yeah, um, no. It does not. At all.

Surgo wrote:

TheFlatline wrote:To be fair copyright law generally demands that you defend your copyright or you lose it.

Yeah, um, no. It does not. At all.

He's presumably thinking of Trademark, which lasts in perpetuity as long as the holder uses and defends the trademark. And which by extension can be lost if the holder doesn't use or defend the trademark.

Magic is "the gathering" because you can trademark a phrase much more readily than you can trademark a common use noun by itself. Hex: Shards of Fate is not especially infringing on that trademark. They use a different font, a different number of words, and even the phrase refers to essentially the opposite concept: falling apart (shards) rather than coming together (gathering). Now it's possible that Hex can get nailed for copying some other trademark that WotC has. Maybe they have a world called Nyx or something, the Cryptozoic people don't seem to have been terribly careful about IP scrubbing. But nothing in WotC's filed legal brief makes me believe that is the case.

WotC's legal brief leads me to believe that their lawyers don't actually know how either game works, because I could tell immediately that they were using a lot of the wrong terminology for Magic cards and with 30 seconds of googling I was able to determine that they were also using the wrong terminology for Hex cards as well. Claiming that people are infringing on your terminology and then listing examples that have terminology you don't even use should, in any just world, get your case thrown out with a hearty laugh. Unfortunately, I rather suspect that the judge they end up being assigned will have no idea that Magic: the Gathering does not have cards called "Resources."

-Username17

TheFlatline wrote:To be fair copyright law generally demands that you defend your copyright or you lose it. So any time WOTC thinks that they have a case that a jury might find reasonable, they pretty much *have* to release the hounds. If they don't defend copyright vigorously enough someone can come along, make a flat out clone of Magic, and then claim copyright lapsed because WOTC didn't defend their copyright and that would be at the very least a court battle that WOTC doesn't want.

The patent shit? *Shrugs* Early in a lawsuit like this you throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

There are three major forms of IP law: copyrights, trademarks, and patents.

Ccopyright is ownership of the particular way in which an idea is expressed, but not the idea itself. You can't own the idea of a boy who lives with his abusive aunt and uncle and then discovers he is a wizard, but you can own the particular story of Harry Potter. Copyright lasts until it doesn't, which is usually a fuck off huge time. Copyright protects artists from having their content monetized without being represented, which is great. But copyright also kills transformative and derivative works, like remixes, tributes, parodies, mods, and fanfiction. WotC doesn't really have a copyright case unless Hex has stolen creative (not functional) assets from MtG, such as the art or fluff text or very exact wording.

Trademark (and trade dress) is ownership of a brand identity. You can own the right to sell products with the Magic the Gathering logo and branding. You can't start a CCG line called Magick of the Gathered, because there is basically a zero percent chance that what you're trying to is legitimate or fair. Trademarks last until you stop using and defending them. Trademarks protect consumers from being deceived, which is literally the only unambiguously terrible thing IP laws stop - you can have very long and heated debates about the merits of everything else, but "you shouldn't lie to consumers about what you're selling them" is something pretty much everyone can agree on. But trademarks are also sometimes really stupid, like the fact that Publisher King has tried to trademark the words "Candy" and "Saga." Not together, separately. You heard about the Banner Saga snafu. Yes, that really was over the single word 'saga,' and the same company was until very recently claiming a trademark on the single word 'candy.' WotC is claiming they have a trademark (trade dress, really, which is just a trademark for your product's aesthetic so people don't impersonate your products that way) case, based primarily on the fact that the cards have all the same things on them mostly and that makes it look like their stuff and people will be confused somehow. Of course, Yu-Gi-Oh has the same layout, so what the fuck ever. Also: the layout is functional, and you just can't do that.

Patent is ownership of an idea or method. You can patent anything, except when you can't, at least until a court says you can. If that description cleared up exactly nothing, welcome to patent law. Patents expire much sooner than copyright, but still in a timeframe measured in decades. Ideally, patents reward the process of invention and development with an artificial monopoly, and this creates incentives for innovation. But you just gave someone a fucking monopoly. They no longer need to innovate jack shit and no one else can because you made it fucking illegal. Instead, they'll just incrementally improve and repatent their product every 20 years (competitors can't because it'd be a violation of the original patent) and everyone else can suck their balls. The most significant influence of patent law is that it kills millions of people each year on the low end. Big Pharma's IP lobbyists are arguably some of the most genocidal fucks on the planet. And while this sounds like flippant exaggeration, it really fucking isn't. The monopolies handed out to Big Pharma create artificial scarcity for and block innovation on life-saving drugs and the end result is millions of people die from easily preventable diseases because it's illegal to treat them cheaply or even develop ways to treat them more cheaply. WotC thinks they have a patent case, because they copyrighted a bunch of the ideas and methods for playing their game. Normally, they would not have a case, but courts just make this shit up as they go and there is a non-zero chance that they will hand WotC rights to the genre because they no goddamn idea what they're doing.

The moral of the story is that patent law is only ever used to stop markets from being competitive, and at this point it's so deeply corrupt and vile that the world would be better off just not having it. The idea of encouraging innovation by preventing competition is fundamentally fucked.

Extremely Related.

[img]data:image/jpeg;base64,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[/img]
Patent Violation. Also Winning.

-Username17

darkmaster wrote:Well, fortunately for wizards the Yu-Gi-Oh metagame is becoming more and more of goddamn mess as time goes by. So they don't even need to sue them.

Yeah this is stupid and if there is any justice they will be made to pay for wasting the court's time with this asinine law suit.

How do you figure? I mean it sounds like the game in question is in fact a GIANT RIPOFF of Magic: The Gathering. Aren't they rather justified, ethically if not legally?

Well mostly the mostly the makers of Yu-Gi-Oh the cartoon keep making dumb decisions to up the steaks and the makers of the card game are forced to make stuff from the show so they can continue to sell to fans of the show.

Oh, you mean the lawsuit being a huge waste of the court's time. Um... I'm not sure, so I'm just going to level with you and ask, are you just being an asshole of are you asking seriously?

There are excellent reasons to have some intellectual property protection on the books. Copyright encourages artists to create, trademarks protect consumers from fakes, and patents give an incentive to divulge discoveries rather than keep them secret. The problem lies more with our specific implementation here in the US (insane copyright duration, software patents, etc) and with some unpleasant quirks of our legal system (insane punitive damage awards, the extreme difficulty of claiming attorney fees with a successful defense, etc). The USPTO also has this horrible habit of granting boneheaded obvious patents or ridiculously broad patents.

We need some serious reform, but a lot of it has been made very difficult indeed. I'm not even talking about corruption - though goodness knows there is plenty of that - but past politicians have used some unpleasant tactics to lock us into certain laws. The DMCA is a good example; we basically wrote the DMCA as a clause into a bunch of trade treaties. If we want to amend or repeal the DMCA, it also means renegotiating or breaking those treaties. The time and effort required boggles the mind. Even trying would be political suicide.

I honestly think the simplest and easiest fix to copyright it so to straight up give successful defenses attorney's fees.

It literally does nothing to change who does or does not actually win any cases, so it can't possibly ruin the law. (Although, who wins cases also needs to be changed, and the laws behind that.)

But what it does do is double the cost of unsuccessful pursuits, which straight up fucks patent trolls, and it would create a large class of contingent defenders of patent/copyright claims (not true contingent in form, but in practice, where they basically take your case "pro bono" if they lose it, but if they win it, they get paid by the opposition).

And of course, it would be a lot harder for Disney or King or someone to use pressure of litigation as a threat to get what they want if there are a bunch of lawyers who will just take that case knowing Disney will have to pay.

Schwarzkopf wrote:Aren't they rather justified, ethically if not legally?

Explain why you think this. I don't really see what is ethically questionable about making a MtG clone. I say let whoever produces the better product win, not whoever did it first.

Drolyt wrote:

Schwarzkopf wrote:Aren't they rather justified, ethically if not legally?

Explain why you think this. I don't really see what is ethically questionable about making a MtG clone. I say let whoever produces the better product win, not whoever did it first.

Especially because the things they are copying are the idea of hit points, and creature blocking your direct hit points, and the hit points being 20.

Patenting that is literally just patenting the number 20.

Hex made a CCG with a different resource mechanic. But they didn't reinvent the concept of hit points. But neither did Hearthstone. The fact of 20-30 difference is not a meaningful difference that makes one a ripoff and the other original.

Schwarzkopf wrote:

darkmaster wrote:Well, fortunately for wizards the Yu-Gi-Oh metagame is becoming more and more of goddamn mess as time goes by. So they don't even need to sue them.

Yeah this is stupid and if there is any justice they will be made to pay for wasting the court's time with this asinine law suit.

How do you figure? I mean it sounds like the game in question is in fact a GIANT RIPOFF of Magic: The Gathering. Aren't they rather justified, ethically if not legally?

The FPS genre exists today and is full of competing products because when people started ripping off Wolfenstein (or its more archaic predecessors) no one gave a fuck. TTRPG's other than D&D exist today because Gygax was wrong when he said that the idea was "his" and everyone else should fuck off.

If you tell people they can't make products that are like other people's products, you're basically just telling people they aren't allowed to open up competing brands. When the capitalists fap to the power of competition, they're right. It drives down prices and improves quality, and when you straight up hand people monopoly rights the end results are artificial scarcity and developmental stagnancy and consumers suffer. And consider what you are causing this suffering in order to protect: the right of whoever's first to rake in fat stacks of cash regardless of the relative quality of their product. There is very little ethical about that.

Go back to the Big Pharma example, because in that case "consumers having less fun for more money" is replaced with "consumers suffering and dying more for more money." Both of those are obviously bad, but the scale of the latter makes the ethics of the situation completely obvious. If we wholesale abolished patent law today, pharmaceutics technology would jump 6-8 years instantly (delayed development and planned obscolescence becomes a rush to market with the best product), prices plummet (monopolist advantage and artificial scarcity get the axe), and supply increases (artificial scarcity just got the axe, lower price increase demand which will lead to greater production). And honestly, you can't even make the argument about how it would kill private innovation, because under current patent law private innovation is actively harmful. Once someone has a patent on something like that, you are guaranteed 20 years of insane prices and developmental stagnancy because lolmonopoly - "if you don't like it, you can take your business elsewhere AHAHAHA that joke never gets old no but really you'll die."

There might be some same incarnation of patent law that rewards patent holders and doesn't cause instant market failure, but our incarnation is so bad that we would genuinely be better off not having it at all.

Big Pharma's general response to the drug cost thing goes something like...

"The drug market is such that when a competitor came out with something that works you can mass-spec and reverse engineer it with a fraction of the work that they put in to develop it. If you eliminate monopoly protection of the sector it would not result in a massive advances past the first boom, because no one would be doing research or trials on new drugs just to be ripped off when they succeeded. Research costs / trial costs / failed drugs costs need to be paid for, and we do that by overcharging for successful drugs. Yes, we get back more than we spent, but those costs are non-trivial and uncertain in the first place, and those sorts of gambles should result in big payouts when they succeed. You're not going to get anyone else to cover them without that sort of profit motives."

Now that's probably shit, but I'm not sufficiently well read on the subject to discuss why (other than the big payout part, which is just greed culture bullshit). It also might be me unintentionally strawmanning them, in which case I'm sorry. Anyway, I'm just going to leave that there for someone else to correct or take apart.

[edit] Even if that's a reasonable expectation for pharma, that sort of argument only applies to things with large up-front investments. It still doesn't really hold for software patents or lots and lots of other things. Hell, revising patent law around investment and research costs / time might be a decent starting point.

TarkisFlux wrote:Big Pharma's general response to the drug cost thing goes something like...

"The drug market is such that when a competitor came out with something that works you can mass-spec and reverse engineer it with a fraction of the work that they put in to develop it. If you eliminate monopoly protection of the sector it would not result in a massive advances past the first boom, because no one would be doing research or trials on new drugs just to be ripped off when they succeeded. Research costs / trial costs / failed drugs costs need to be paid for, and we do that by overcharging for successful drugs. Yes, we get back more than we spent, but those costs are non-trivial and uncertain in the first place, and those sorts of gambles should result in big payouts when they succeed. You're not going to get anyone else to cover them without that sort of profit motives."

Now that's probably shit, but I'm not sufficiently well read on the subject to discuss why (other than the big payout part, which is just greed culture bullshit). It also might be me unintentionally strawmanning them, in which case I'm sorry. Anyway, I'm just going to leave that there for someone else to correct or take apart.

[edit] Even if that's a reasonable expectation for pharma, that sort of argument only applies to things with large up-front investments. It still doesn't really hold for software patents or lots and lots of other things. Hell, revising patent law around investment and research costs / time might be a decent starting point.

That is essentially pharma's argument, but it is full of shit. The amount medicare alone would save if we got rid of patents would cover all of those research costs if we just switched to a prize system.

So, an important thing to remember about a perfectly competitive market (infinite firms with no barriers to entry + omniscient and rational consumers + some other bullshit that is also impossible) is that long run profit doesn't happen. The price you charge for a good is the cost to produce that good. If you charge lower, you are obviously on a path towards self-destruction. If you charge higher, your omniscient and rational consumers abandon you instantly in favor of your infinitely many competitors. A lot of free market enthusiasts won't tell you this (indeed, many of them don't even know it), because modern free market ideology isn't about creating free markets - it's about protecting failed markets from government correction because failed markets are profitable.

But basically, as an extension of this, you can totally use net profit as a rough, somewhat unacademic lower-bound indicator of how uncompetitive a given market is (I say lower-bound, because accounting shenanigans to hide profit are a thing and because the fuck-off huge sums of money paid to the class of high-level executives and such frequently count as operating costs even though they are bullshit high and basically just ownership privileges hidden in a paycheck). Well, here's the numbers: big pharma's top 20 companies rake in 500 billion USD a year and their net profit is 100 billion USD a year. Even in the context of their own argument (covering costs), they are full of shit and are actually enjoying a twenty-fucking-five percent lolmonopoly bonus, minimum.

Also, because monopolies create profit by raising prices, they skew their customer base away from the poor and towards the wealthy. Which means a lot of the revenue that they do reinvest into the industry is aimed at solving fairly trivial middle class white guy problems and ignoring incredibly severe lower class other people problems - which is a grave misallocation of resources from both a utilitarian standpoint (because it fucking kills people) and economic standpoint (because it's partly a monopoly effect).

So no. They are full of shit. For the record: so are the telecom companies, who argue very similar things about how expensive and risky what they do is so give them all the moneys also the tubes are clogged with porn gunk and Netflix needs to pay to clean them even though the exact same tubes currently support their own T.V. services flawlessly.

I'd be careful about using net profit as a bound on competition in the sales marketplace -- it could just as easily mean that the company's employees are seriously underpaid (and in bio, imo, that is the case).

I'm not arguing with your interpretation, just saying.

Surgo wrote:I'd be careful about using net profit as a bound on competition in the sales marketplace -- it could just as easily mean that the company's employees are seriously underpaid (and in bio, imo, that is the case).

I'm not arguing with your interpretation, just saying.

Underpaying your employees is just having a lower cost of production, and in a perfectly competitive environment prices will still fall to the new, lower cost of production. In order to raise prices above your cost of production, you have to have an asymmetric advantage. If you have an asymmetric advantage, the market is not perfectly competitive and has, to some extent, failed.

But yeah, there are totally ways for that measure to be off, though almost certainly not by the magnitude we're talking here. I edited in a little "totally not academic" disclaimer.

It's a real shame people can't pull their heads out of their asses anymore.
Most people really give zero fucks about why the 'system' doesn't work anymore. The fact that it is all layer upon layer of good AND bad decisions completely escapes most people.

They want quick, sweeping, fixes... and of you want actually stable fixes to systematic problems, it takes time. Time, focus, drive, innovation and... most importantly, people who give a shit.

---

Oh, side note about telecom and electric companies.
ONE fucking telephone pole is something like... 1500 to... 10,000 USD to replace.

codeGlaze wrote:It's a real shame people can't pull their heads out of their asses anymore.
Most people really give zero fucks about why the 'system' doesn't work anymore. The fact that it is all layer upon layer of good AND bad decisions completely escapes most people.

They want quick, sweeping, fixes... and of you want actually stable fixes to systematic problems, it takes time. Time, focus, drive, innovation and... most importantly, people who give a shit.

---

Oh, side note about telecom and electric companies.
ONE fucking telephone pole is something like... 1500 to... 10,000 USD to replace.

I'm really not sure what the point of this post was, but telecommunications and electric power distribution are natural monopolies and do not benefit from market competition. I think they should be government chartered non-profits, but I'm open to other ideas.

codeGlaze wrote:It's a real shame people can't pull their heads out of their asses anymore.
Most people really give zero fucks about why the 'system' doesn't work anymore. The fact that it is all layer upon layer of good AND bad decisions completely escapes most people.

They want quick, sweeping, fixes... and of you want actually stable fixes to systematic problems, it takes time. Time, focus, drive, innovation and... most importantly, people who give a shit.

My first instinct here is to make fun of you being an actual honest to god concern troll. "Sure, sure, patent law is driving up healthcare costs to absolutely insane levels, stifling innovation in countless sectors, and also kinda sorta killing millions of people a year... but we wouldn't want to be a bunch of radicals, would we? If we stick with it, maybe magic fairies will give us the perfect answer and we won't have to make any hard decisions."

At its core, a patent is a promise by the government to go (metaphorically) beat up people who improve upon or utilize your ideas. Under patent law, the reward for innovation is the right to block a bunch of innovation. That is fundamentally fucked. Theoretically, you could tweak variables until the innovation created by dangling monopoly rights as an incentive outweighs the innovation destroyed by your stupid fucking patent system (as well as the harm caused by creating monopolies left and right), but at the end of the day its still a system that attempts to incentivize progress by destroying competition and innovation! It borders on self-parody.

It's a bullshit system that has finally created the oligopoly it was doomed to, and now it needs scrapped and replaced with a public funding model or an award model or even literally nothing at all - because every single one of those would be an improvement over this. More realistically, I would love to see mandatory full rights (including straight up imitation) patent licensing at no higher than a set rate, creating an effective cap on the extent to which patent holders can abuse their monopoly privileges. It is still definitionally inefficient, but less inefficient than what we have now and far more politically feasible than radical overhaul.

codeGlaze wrote:Oh, side note about telecom and electric companies.
ONE fucking telephone pole is something like... 1500 to... 10,000 USD to replace.

I honestly have no idea what the fuck you are saying here. You can't just drop contextless numbers and expect them to impress people.

Here, let me show you: AT&T's 2013 net profit was 18 billion USD! [edit: what the hell? How did I lose the number in that sentence?] Are you persuaded yet? Of... something? Anything? It's certainly a very big number. That's got to count for something, right?

The suit alleges that Hex: Shards of Fate, a MMOTCG currently in Closed Beta testing prior to full launch, infringes

I like this part. suing over something that is not available to purchase. i could make my own damn magic cards for personal use all i want, and this beta testing is NOT a product. This has been tried before somewhere and hope it comes back as precedent, that there is NO product yet to cause suit.

I hope that being a premature suit, that WotC/HASBRO is barred from suing at a later date because they jumped the gun well ahead of time on this one.

if they allow WotC/HASBRO to wint his, then it means people could be sued at the development phase before anything is really done to even give them a chance to make something new. WotC was the one that stole Forge Grounds or something dice to use in a promotional shot of the 4th edition VTT, and got called on it very quick by EVERYONE.

copied the look and feel, the ornamental aspects, and the pleasing and ornamental layout of the functional features of Magic trading cards

did they copy the same artwork itself or is this trying to be played off as those B&W pictures in from f Big Ben with the red bus in them?

how many different ways has MTG designed cards, so ar they going to claim ALL possible ways to add horizontal rules with text, art, etc is all the layout of the cards and copyright to WotC?

I hope a judge laughs and Crypto brings in pokemon cards and Yugioh cards and other WotC competitor cards to show how almost ALL of them have similar layouts, and in the course WotC looses its copyright to the term "Tap" for turning a card sideways.

DSMatticus wrote:Under patent law, the reward for innovation is the right to block a bunch of innovation.

Actually, you're eliding a key detail: the reward is for revealing an innovation. You can also get exclusive use out of an innovation by keeping it secret, so a properly functioning patent system incentivizes you to publicize your discoveries, making it much easier for other people to use them and innovate.

There's no money in keeping a new idea secret. Money incentivizes you to go public. You don't need a patent for that. Making more money incentivizes you to innovate that idea faster than other people. The incentives for innovation don't even stop there. You can become famous for inventing something new, recognition among peers, or in general is a thing people can use.