Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Saw this in the news recently about Nintendo and thought I would post it here:

http://news.yahoo.com/nintendo-wins-app ... 59632.html

Even though Nintendo won this decision, it sounds like the case is far from over with more appeals to come.

I am a bit tired of all those court battles these days, especially when companies fill billions of patents but don't use them, or they sue other companies over generic features. This hampers technological development, and encourage companies to patent lots of things instead of developing products for the consumers.

If this company was a direct Nintendo competitor that had its business ruined by Nintendo use of their technology, it would be okay. However, though the company may have claimed it wanted to establish a "domestic industry", it only sued Nintendo in 2008, 2 years after Wii and its motion sensors were around, and mainly only after Wii use of motion sensors proved to be a success.

That means, it is easy to be wise after the event and claim they could have profitted from technology use when someone else did, but why didn't they sue Nintendo before Wii launch or as soon as it was launched? The same goes for all those court battles between big smartphone and tablet companies. They only started suing each other after their competitors products had a considerable chunk of the market.

Yeah, it only hurts development for certain. Look at Palm and Handspring as examples, neither are around now and they sued each other back and forth until Handsrping went out of business, and then the next thing you know Palm starts getting sued over intellectual patents and then they went out of business. It's really quite absurd all these people and companies suing each other especially when the party suing has never even produced product but holds a worthless piece of paper that allegedly gives them ownership over ideas and concepts.

About as bad as Monsanto being permitted to patent natural lifeforms and human genes. And don't you just know that one day they will try to charge you a licensing fee for posessing some of "their" patented, naturally occurring, genes in your own DNA structure. Just wait and see if it doesn't happen.