This blog is about a question in our class today: should software copyright be patented? At first I thought that no, it shouldn't. Who on earth would ever patent ideas that are easily overlapped? But reviewing some cases happening recently in the Software and Game Industry, I have to rethink about my point of view.
The software industry is very very large. Starting with some simple ideas, the outcome software product can be very different. Let's take an example of the project I did last semester. In CS2103T, all of us (64 groups) have to write a program to simulate a to-do manager, a program that helps the users to manage tasks that they have to do everyday to make sure they can work effectively without worrying about forgetting everyday's task. The original idea was simple, but I was surprised that the products at the end of the semester are very different. All of them have unique GUI (graphics user interface) and perhaps, different data structure too. So it's very hard for one to determine whether a software is successful or not. We can only say if a program is successful financially or not. A well-known program can even perform worse than some less known program, but when referring to a program
The problems get more complicated when we come to game industry. In a game, it's not just simply the graphics that attract the users. What lies inside a successful game is a good story line, a unique art-style and a deep gameplay. Blizzard is a game producer that understand theses factors the most. 10 years ago, they released Warcraft 3, which is the base for World of Warcraft, the most successful MMORPG of all times. Warcraft 3 has a special feature: it provides users a World Editor, which allows the users to create map using their own creativity. They then can share it for other players to play together. One of the most successful map is Defense of the Ancient - DotA, which created another game genre: MOBA - Muli-Online Battle Arena. The problem is that Valve, another game producer, famous for some revolutionary game that changed the Game Industry like Half-Life, Portal,.. have seen the potential of this genre and they registered trademark for DotA 2 and even DotA 3. What matter here is that when playing the game, players can very easily notice that the heroes models designed in Valve' DotA 2 looks very similar to DotA, in which the map creator used Blizzard's original game models. The way heroes react to each other, aka 'skills' are also the same (actually the map creator transferred all skills from DotA 1 to DotA 2 so that players will not waste time exploring new gameplays and the developers are easier to work), which already means that these people are using Blizzard's ideas to make their own game without any contribution to Blizzard's game.
