I've written a pretty extensive article about videogames and intellectual property called The Videogame in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for Armchair Arcade. Of course, those of you who read my posts are familiar with my stance towards intellectual property law, but I tried to take a more conservative approach in this piece. I relied heavily on Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and the work of Richard Stallman to make my case. I really wanted to demonstrate, first of all, how the history of videogames begins in "open source," and the further we have moved from that model, the worse innovation has suffered. I did a lot of research for this piece, which I hope shows!

Videogame (and software) history is studded with stories of intellectual propery litigation. Ralph Baer, a patent-monger if I've ever seen one, managed to extort a licensing fee from Nolan Bushnell for every Pong unit sold. Data East sued Epyx (and then vice versa) for allegedly cloning a fighting game. The list goes on, and it's not hard to see that it's getting harder and harder for the small guys to make games without fear of treading on feudalist's property.

I was really pleased with the way this paragraph turned out:

My next point is not so much about piracy as the benefits of promoting derivatives of published works. As we discussed earlier regarding the derivation of all modern software titles from works that have come before, and the questionable nature of litigations against “cloning,” we ought to loudly oppose and find ways to resist practices that stifle this form of creativity. Contemporary software programmers ought to feel as free to borrow from old and new software as freely as those who came before them. The term “clone” here is misleading, because I cannot advocate the silly practice of literally copying a work and then taking credit for it. What I do fear is that software innovations will soon be challenged by the giant multinational corporations on the basis of an alleged patent or copyright infringement. Amazon’s one-click ordering is one thing, but what if the major software makers began patenting concepts critical to a genre of videogames? Let us assume, for instance, that someone owned the patent to “first person shooters,” and required all subsequent first-person shooter titles to either purchase an expensive license or, more likely, simply forbid all such derivations (to maintain a stranglehold monopoly). What about the maker of a racing simulation who threatened other game-makers because their products mimicked the “look and feel” of theirs and thus infringed on a patent? Clearly, we ought to fight software patents as much as we can; I can think of no advantages to this scheme and only looming disadvantages to everyone involved (including the owner of the patent, who ought to be worried about making further innovations rather than forbidding those of others).

I am very supportive of open source development, and especially love freeware and those willing to dedicate their assemblies to the public domain. When I think about software patents and copyrights, I think about those people who would try to shut down the free software movement. Sure, wouldn't it be wonderful for them if all software was appropriately "protected" and denied to those unable or unwilling to pay them for it.

Maybe I have become a Marxist. I can hear a Marxist saying "The first thing we have to do is get rid of private property" and think, "No, the first thing is private intellectual property." This has become one of the foundations of my personal philosophy and fuels most of my writing these days.

What gets me, though, is that perhaps it isn't really necessary to actively fight intellectual property law. Perhaps when it becomes obvious that these laws have become so restrictive that they are, in fact, inhibiting innovation and stifling progress, then perhaps the key will be not so much to push it down than to leap out of the way when it comes toppling down. Already some major corporate players have entered the fray on the side of open source; I'm thinking here, of course, of IBM's dumping millions into Linux development (and about time, too, what with Microsoft's Longhorn just on the horizon). It's an interesting time to be alive, that's for sure.