ugh, patent? really?

Patent law is a blight upon humanity and one of the biggest hinderances of our development.

Example of software patent: Amazon patentended "one click buy"; after barns and nobles has had it for months. amazon sued barns and nobles, who lost the suit and had to pay amazon huge sums of money AND remove the "one click buy" buttons from their web pages. According to amazon CEO, he was sitting down one day when he got the idea to patent it, he called up the legal team and the web team, and less then a day later it was done and implemented. he commented that if he didn't patent it, someone else would have and used it against him.

In the gaming market, someone has patented the use of an arrow floating above a controllable character pointing at the direction of your next objective... some games were sued... remove said feature.

another company patented the idea of having a minigame during loading screens. If you want a minigame in your loading screen you must pay royalties to the patent owner. 

Patents have no room at all in the software market, be it gaming or OS and productivity. even "app innovation" should not be patentable.

Copyright, sure. Someone can NOT use your CODE without your permission... but if someone decides to implement a "start button" using a unique set of code, all the more power to them.

Suck up. 

Just the truth. Had I preferred steam I'd probably be over at THEIR forums

Also because a license is a fair method of distribution... Stardock fairly assumes their share of responsibilities for a license, and grant you all the rights that a license entails. Unlike EA which tries to screw you by saddling you with the responsibilities of a phyisical object and a license, and the benefits of neither, while claiming for themselves the benefits of both and responsibilities of neither.

Define intellectual property.

Physical property is clear and easy to define and important to protect... so called intellectual property is not. It is also anathema to the free market. It might be more fair and even better to society if companies could research things and have them protected from copy cats (it IS valuable to a certain degree), but there is nothing "free market" about it.

And in its current incarnation, it is about copyrighting abstract ideas... or things you haven't created

EX: the human genome is copyrighted and patented... each gene to the group that has discovered it first. Nobody is suing people for having children... but I can see it being a problem for someone who wishes to offer genetic treatments and artificial child creation services

Humanity !!!! Since when the US is the humanity...

The European Patent Convention (EPC), Article 52, paragraph 2, excludes from patentability, "in particular

1. discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
2. aesthetic creations;
3. schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers
4. presentations of information."

In fact, the US patent system is simply a big joke... Google have patented their "push/pull" method in their Sketchup 3d software... when in fact, these "push/pull" is nothing more that the "intrude/extrude" used in any other 3D software who have ever be created...

yes, Amazon patented "one click buy"... tomorrow, someone other will have a patent for a "buy with one click" !!!! Same thing but named differently... More bad, it is not unusual in the case of software, that the patented code was stolen from the open source...

In the past, US was the country of freedom, the place where usual citizen was with right, a example for the rest of humanity... but slowly, US citizen become like sheep without any right... basic right removed slowly one after one... crying on forum like this one, showing some hate for game distributor will change nothing... only people who can change something are these you have vote for... ban the politic campain sponsor by business and maybe, politic will listen more to the simple citizen... all is politic and politic is controlled by big business... by the way, it is very difficult to change laws who are already voted...

The real guilty in these DRM, patent, copyright scheme is the usual citizen who have not react when these laws was proposed... you see now the result of your past indifference...

a license is a fair method of distribution...

First, a license is not a method of distribution... mainly, you have two method... hardcopy or online download...

About the license, it is embedded in the Eula... being the owner of a digital version of sins and a hardcopy, Eula is somehow not identical...

By example, with the digital download, i have "The SOFTWARE is not sold, it is licensed."... but my boxed version have "Le présent document constitue un contrat ... relatif à l'utilisation du produit que vous avez acquis." ... blue part meaning "use of the product that you have buy"...

Other example.... digital download : "If you accept the terms and conditions of this"... nothing is wrote in the case you don't accept the terms and conditions... but in the boxed version, it is wrote "Si vous n'acceptez pas ces termes, veuillez retourner ce produit à votre revendeur."... meaning that we can return the product if we don't agree with the Eula...

Nobody read Eula, readme, license file... i do !!! You will be surprised of the diference between digital and boxed version... not the case with Stardock but some wrote in their license that they can change the terms and conditions of their license when they wish without informing you... something fully illegal here since it is a contract and not a license... both side need to agree to any change else a refound become possible...

Be sure that the majority of game distributor follow any local laws... some are really bad distributor at the limit of the legality but only a few are illegal... problem are not the distributor but the laws !!!

By the way, why do you think that some game release are US only... simply because US laws allow to screw up more easily the customer !!! The Eula, terms, license, contract of  some product released in the US will be purely illegal in some other part of the world...

No you shouldn't, not when it's something like code. Yes, there are some software "inventions" worth patenting but some of this code is no different than a creative sentence within the English language. It's bad enough, in the USA, you have fat cat's trying trademark sentences as if they were the first one to say "You're Fired". It's similar in trying to patent a movie or a book, even though a lot of books and movies borrow from existing work which, personally, I don't have an issue with. But for some reason, software companies seem to think that because its digital, no rules apply to them. Just because you make something that is easier to steal than items in the past, doesn't give you the right to supercede consumer rights while trying to protect your work. I am challenging your idea that these companies are inventing anything at all.  Making a game, even a good one, is not inventing something. In the process there might be a new method used that could be worth patenting but as someone already pointed out, our patent laws are pretty messed up. So messed up I am waiting for the day where some company wants to claim the rights to the thoughts in my head because they "invented" a part of the brain.

There are some fairly unique and memorable quotes throughout history, but these people didn't actually invent the language they were speaking now did they? Can you imagine how limited things, in terms of techonolgy and services, would be today if we had the hard ass grabs for patents and copyrights of today when things were just starting out. 

Let's protect the code, as in not allowing someone to actually copy it directly, package it as their own or just start reproducing someone else's work. We have laws to go after people like that. Use them. Software should be under copyright law and the companies should be limited by the first sale doctrine.. The software industry seems to be at the forefront of destroying its own used copy market by any means necessary, including and not limited to ensuring that any copy of their work will be unretrievable in a 100 years because of the archaic links they are forcing their copies to have to their, the companies, actual existence. 

*Puts on tinfoil hat*

I tend to agree with the OP actually.  I think the ultimate goal with DRM is to have everything in digital format so:

-They can completely cut out the middle men (retailers)

-They can completely eliminate the secondary market (renting and selling used)

-They can start imposing more serious limitations on things.

I fully expect in 10 years or so you will start seeing time limitations.  You will in essence no longer be buying games/movies/music, but merely renting them for a year or two.  People will complain at first, but ultimately start rationalizing it.

I admit that there's no such thing as a unified free market ideology; calling them a single group is as bad as assuming that all Christians, Hindus, or Muslims are the same or that everyone from Brooklyn likes pizza and likes it prepared the same way.

I was mainly taking a quick swipe at the large number of people who love to talk about government as if it were always and everywhere a problem when in fact it is the backbone of any 'free' market because it provides a way to apply legitimate force to both correct misbehavior and create new economic opportunities. Intellectual property is purely in the latter category. Unlike physical property that can be defended by private arms regardless of legal ownership, intellectual property simply has no existence without government power behind it.

Exactly  - it's about control.  The whole thing with cloud computing drives me nuts too.  It cannot be denied that the more that exists "out there" in your computing environment, the less control you have.  Other than an MMO which by default has to be in the cloud, I will never relinquish control of my computing to servers I have no control over - games, documents, or otherwise.  That includes activations.  The only game I've bought with activation limits (revocable, but still) is Mass Effect, and that is only so I'll have a save game to use in Mass Effect 2 (which has only a disk check).

Love it!

It doesn't communicate directly, there is a program called "EA download manager", it is the one that authenticates online.

@aeortar: did you know:

1. EULAs have been upheld in courts.

2. Pharmaceutical companies and food creators (as of yet, only via hybridization and selective breeding), and other related companies all make EULAs saying that by buying their products you may not:

a. Test them to see if they are harmful to people

b. Give them to someone else.

This makes it illegal for 3rd party groups to verify the original safety claims until the product's patent expire... NEVER buy a drug for which there is no generic, because it is illegal for anyone to verify that it isn't harmful.

3. Many EULAs include a blurb saying that by agreeing to it, you automatically agree to any revisions they make to it in the future.

4. etc

Looks like I made a mistake with DA:Origins - I'd frequently got an error message when trying to load a saved game saying I had to be logged in as it used DLC (and so assumed it meant just that), but it seems I only get this message when I'm actually online+logged in, and it lets me play fine offline.

Which countries/jurisdictions has this happened in? From a quick look online it seems it's gone both ways in the US, but I can't find anywhere detailing whether it's been upheld elsewhere, such as in the EU. I'm assuming EULAs are frequently the same across countries, even when the laws can be signficantly different, and so would be shocked if there weren't a number of western countries for whom EULAs weren't enforceable.

Also wherever they are deemed enforceable the law is in need of an urgent rewrite (although again back to the issue of politicians appearing to be happy to ignore any such issues presumably due to antiquated stereotypes about gamers)