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20 years is a long time. For some fields, it is perfectly reasonable, but 20 year patents on many recent CS inventions would have significantly bottlenecked dev
by GauntletWizard 6y ago
20 years is a long time. For some fields, it is perfectly reasonable, but 20 year patents on many recent CS inventions would have significantly bottlenecked development of the industry - Look at how much mess was created by the JPEG patents, for example, and similar problems have existed for every other not-explicitly-libre A/V codec.
- pixelpoet 6y agoWhile we're on the subject of patents and Nvidia, their patent on using quasi Monte Carlo in rendering is allowing them to hold basically the whole path tracing world hostage, e.g. possibly forcing people to use CUDA who might otherwise have used OpenCL. They didn't even invent the numerical methods themselves (pure mathematics from other countries from long ago), they were just first to file for a particular application.