I know people don’t think about these things, but I was just reading an interesting news story about how NAMCO, the creating company of Pac-Man, has sent a take down order to a bunch of students at MIT who were using Scratch to re-create Pac-Man. In other words, while teaching themselves out to create games, they created a simple game and then used that learn how to make more complex games. Makes sense. But if NAMCO has its way, no one will be able to re-create Pac-Man, even if it is for the sake of learning how to program.
Think about that for a moment and then think about the ramifications. Well, let me put it in other terms that might help point out the significance. I’ll use the TV show Survivors, or the movie The Road, or the Book of Eli, or any other dystopian disaster flick, to explain. Imagine that you had no more technology left and had to learn from scratch (for lack of better word). Well, if you did it the normal way, you would have to learn by reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Well, imagine if some company had made it impossible to reinvent the wheel, but wanted you to have to invent a brand new car without having to learn how to make a wheel first. Start to see the problem?
Computer programmers learn by adding on to what was learned before. That’s innovation in the software world. They don’t arbitrarily just create new code out of the blue without first knowing what has been done before them. It’s like an architect who is expected to develop post-modernism without first understanding modernism. Okay, not a great example, but you probably get the point.
This is the problem we’re running into with a lawsuit mentality in this country. Patents, trademarks and lawsuits make it so that people are running around claiming common ground so that no one else can possibly duplicate anything that is so basic that it needs to be used in order to do something else. Imagine if Ford had patented the “car” so that no one else could ever make a car. What if the Wright Brothers had patented the “plane”? Same thing. Or if Random House had patented the “book”. While these patents are designed to reward the inventor, at the same time they stifle the innovation of future creators.
Recently, LucasFilm attempted to stop a company from making an industrial laser because it looked too much like a Star Wars lightsaber. Finally, after a media storm kind of made Lucas look REALLY STUPID, Lucas turned around and declared that it felt the company making the lasers was apologetic enough to be left alone to make their–not like Star Wars in any way–lightsaber…I mean, laser.
Hopefully, NAMCO will wise up. If not, I hope they get as much ridicule as they deserve because that’s exactly what they’re going to get by going after MIT students with a desist order in order to protect intellectual property that has stopped making money decades ago.