Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: F.UltraI think that it's a bit more complicated than that, yes patent trolls use this all the time, they have no products and no employees so that they will never ever be hit by a countersuit. But then you could be a lone inventor that just invents new interesting stuff that you then license out to industry that have the capacity to create the stuff that you yourself doesn't and such a rule would hurt such individuals.

Yeah, though licensing stuff out still kind of makes you a patent troll, right? The lone inventor should be able to pitch his idea to a company that either pays him a bunch for it, or royalties, and then that company makes such things. This is how it used to happen.

Then again it used to be that you bought software and owned that copy for your usage, these days you just rent software that becomes obsolete the moment the publishers decide they don't want it to work anymore.

No a patent troll is someone that collects patents to then go look for companies to sue for infringement. You inventing something and then licensing it out to companies that find your invention useful is exactly your "pays him a bunch for it, or royalties". Hiding the patents in secret until you find an infringing party is the troll part of the patent troll.

E.g lets say that you invent some new fantastic new thing that makes something in cars much better, cheaper and environmentally friendlier. Would it be better for society for you to just throw that idea away because you have not enough money to create cars, or if you did then only your cars would benefit from this and no one elses, or you licensing the patent out to all car manufacturers for a fair price which is win-win for everyone.

Ofc you could just hand out the idea for free (which under the current patent system means that some of the big companies could patent it under the first to file rule and thus lock everyone else out including you) or you could hand the patent out for free and starve to death.

This is not a defence of the current patent system, just that I don't think that automatically invalidating patents from holders that do not produce anything would be beneficial for society, or rather it would be less beneficial for society than the current broken system, aka make it more broken and not less.

That software in many aspects is no longer owned but rented out have nothing to do with patents, that is all covered within copyright (which is another system that is broken), though at the same time copyright is what protects things like the GPL from being exploited.

IMHO the main problem is more to do with greed, not to go to far politically here since this is a forum for games and not politics but one way could be to cap the amount of wealth a person or company could acquire, say by means of the type of progressive tax regulation that existed in the US before JFK loosened it up where the top tax bracket was 94% and limiting the time on patents and copyright to more decent values, I mean 25 years for a patent in our fast evolving world is en eternity.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: F.UltraImmersion also want the court to forbid Valve from selling more Steam Decks and Index:es.

They want Valve to be prohibited unless they pay the tithe. Some fee on the units they've sold to date is much less attractive than the fee on the (15? maybe?) millions of future units, plus the fees on Deck 2/Index 2/Controller 2 in the future. They want to just kick back and collect rent; the threat of an injunction is the stick to make everyone get a licence.

This is where I'm a firm believer that the patent system needs to be changed so that if you are not making a physical product based upon a patent you have filed away, then you lose claims to that patent and it becomes public domain. It's that way for Trademarks, basically.

I think that it's a bit more complicated than that, yes patent trolls use this all the time, they have no products and no employees so that they will never ever be hit by a countersuit. But then you could be a lone inventor that just invents new interesting stuff that you then license out to industry that have the capacity to create the stuff that you yourself doesn't and such a rule would hurt such individuals.

Quoting: MadWolfhi let's hope that Valve has the backbone to tell this patent troll where to stick their patents and they make a steam controller 2 or they start making the steam controller 1

Quoting: GuestI think the time is over to think of MS as the pure evil in a company form.

NO M$ is pure evil in a company form why do you think you can not remove telemetry or disable auto updates without hacking the system this is getting into a rant about why I HATE !!! M$ embrace extend extinguish today's M$ is the same M$ as old pure evil

Well the problem for Valve is that Immersion seems to have standing, I mean they have the patents, the patents are valid and have been enforced before (so the likelihood of this court invalidating them is less than 0) AND they filed in the patent friendliest court in the US of A so Valve is kinda shafted here. I don't see any other way for them than doing some out of court settlement for X amount of millions and get e perpetual license for all of Immersions patents.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: F.UltraImmersion also want the court to forbid Valve from selling more Steam Decks and Index:es.

They want Valve to be prohibited unless they pay the tithe. Some fee on the units they've sold to date is much less attractive than the fee on the (15? maybe?) millions of future units, plus the fees on Deck 2/Index 2/Controller 2 in the future. They want to just kick back and collect rent; the threat of an injunction is the stick to make everyone get a licence.

Perhaps, I'm not savvy enough with the lawyer speak in their filing, all I saw was that they have this in their prayer for relief:

B. that the Court enter an injunction prohibiting Valve and its agents, officers,
servants, employees, and all persons in active concert or participation with Valve from deploying,
operating, maintaining, testing, and using the Accused Handheld Instrumentalities and Accused
VR Instrumentalities, and from otherwise infringing any of the Patents-in-Suit;

Perhaps that is as you say intended to be interpreted as just being until they pay some license, but I could not find any text in the actual filing making that demand explicitly.

edit: ok so reading up on it a bit more I think maybe possibly that just asking for a injunction is temporary while they would have asked for a "permanent injunction" if it was to ban them outright from selling the product again.

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Quoting: SethMThis seems slightly iffy, but I'm sure it will work itself out. And worse case, Valve will probably have to pay a fine, which, let's be honest, isn't really going to hurt them.

this is a civil case so there will be no fines, if Valve is deemed guilty then they will have to pay whatever that Immersion says is their license fee for every single unit of Steam Decks sold. It could easily be billions.

Immersion also want the court to forbid Valve from selling more Steam Decks and Index:es.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: MadWolf

Quoting: TheRiddickDo people really love Activation and Blizzard that much?

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: dirkdierickxMS will gladly make these changes, but probably violate them before those 10 years are up. EU will fine MS, but as usual the fine(s) will be peanuts and MS will be happy to pay.

EU fines does not work the same as US fines, EU fines are increased until you comply.

shame, if that is true, they haven't ordered M$ to remove the telemetry spyware/pup (potentially unwanted program) from Windows and other software and most of my time gaming is done on GNU/Linux and I do not plan on downgrading to windows 10/12 for my mane windows install but I do have Windows 10 installed but I only have that for when I can not run software/games on my current install of Windows

they haven't ordered MS to remove it because it isn't illegal of MS to add it.

Wouldn't it be failure to comply with GDPR?

They where being criticized by the EU back in 2019 for not being in full compliance with the GDPR and again in 2022 when EU decided that the changes Microsoft have made was not sufficient. I'm not fully up to date on what if anything have happened with that case since then, all I know is that Microsoft claims that they are following the GDPR and that they only collects the data due to "Legitimate interest".

Now it is allowed to collect data about your users under the GDPR _if_ you can demonstrate that you have a legitimate use case for it, that you will and can destroy it if a user ask for it to be done, that the data will not leave the EU (and afaik MS have built some kind of internal firewall to make sure that data collected from EU machines stay in the EU) and that you are not allowed to sell the data (one big difference between the US and the EU here is that in the US a company owns the data that it has collected about you while in the EU you are the sole owner of that data so legally it is not a commodity).

I would also assume that investigating this is something that will take quite an amount of time.

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Quoting: MadWolf

Quoting: TheRiddickDo people really love Activation and Blizzard that much?

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: dirkdierickxMS will gladly make these changes, but probably violate them before those 10 years are up. EU will fine MS, but as usual the fine(s) will be peanuts and MS will be happy to pay.

EU fines does not work the same as US fines, EU fines are increased until you comply.

shame, if that is true, they haven't ordered M$ to remove the telemetry spyware/pup (potentially unwanted program) from Windows and other software and most of my time gaming is done on GNU/Linux and I do not plan on downgrading to windows 10/12 for my mane windows install but I do have Windows 10 installed but I only have that for when I can not run software/games on my current install of Windows

they haven't ordered MS to remove it because it isn't illegal of MS to add it.

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Quoting: TheRiddick

Quoting: Purple Library GuyNo, they just don't like monopolies, or even oligopolies. Which I'm morally certain you already knew before you asked.

Well its a bit late now isn't it. They should have complained way back when Disney and Apple started buying up the planet....

Antitrust laws only kick in once the involved companies reach a certain size of the market.

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Quoting: dirkdierickxMS will gladly make these changes, but probably violate them before those 10 years are up. EU will fine MS, but as usual the fine(s) will be peanuts and MS will be happy to pay.

EU fines does not work the same as US fines, EU fines are increased until you comply.

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Quoting: MohandevirJust speaking about the value of the Ally... From what I read from different sources, I'm totally unconvinced... Like most of the PCGamers, I already have a more powerful PC... That's why I use my Steam Deck in handheld mode 95% of the time. The other 5% is for couch coop gaming and these games are not usually resource huggers. In my case, battery autonomy is make or break. If all this raw power is wasted because you need to cap everything to gain minutes of playtime... What are you getting? A little more powerful Steam Deck with less input options, unreadable 3rd party apps, crapy os interactions and still worse battery autonomy (the Steam Deck's autonomy is already to the limit)?

If it's a handheld as long as your power cord (who first said that? 😉), It kinds of defeat the purpose and makes it feel like a big marketing smokescreen, to me.

If so, I'll wait for the Steam Deck 2, in this case.

I feel guilty :grin: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/04/asus-rog-ally-gaming-handheld/comment_id=241720

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[quote=PixelDrop]

Quoting: Ardje

Quoting: EikeThe only real in windows progress does not come from Microsoft, but from AMD, NVIDIA and Valve as they keep the gaming on windows alive, and that's about the only thing that keeps windows into households, and with the big amount of lobbying and "I know that OS" keeps it in the offices.

[P/S This is not a rant towards you, just a rant in general to let off some steam.]

And all the other third party software makers. Windows desktop user space software as a whole is vastly more polished, flexible, varied, and accessible than Linux. Every time I try and convert someone to Linux there is 1 to 100 windows programs they use that have no equal on Linux and having to run a ton of things under wine does not leave a good impression.

Linux as a desktop system is an ecosystem of barely functional reinvented tires. 30 programs that do the same thing, and yet someone manage to do it worse than all the windows options that do the same thing, despite having a "better" OS to work with.

In every other sector it's great, but for the actual desktop experience it's a splintered, fragmented mess that may one day focus itself into something different, but honestly I think we have a better chance that macOS will just take over the desktop world. If Apple would ever make officially support hackintosh builds and sell macOS directly I have little doubt it would skyrocket in popularity. The only thing that saves us from that fate is Apple's own greed.

That is basically all down to market share. Aka make a decently useful app for Windows and you can earn enough money to start a business while Linux have too small a market share for more than a few people developing apps on their free time.

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