The problems are simple: A) The patent is retardedly generic and its acceptance is questionable, but what is done is done.
B) It was NOT the brilliant intuition that nobody had before it was claimed to be, prior work too close for comfort existed, but it was a different time and nobody else ran for it (you didn't even have internet logs for patent checking, back then you had to go peruse their library on a regular basis, and some patents would take months to transition between offices and stuff came in in tidal waves). C) Joe is a software patent advocate, and despite claim to the countrary an avid patent filer. He is EXACTLY a patent troll, which is why he puts the OSS community down and ridicules the term. That is also the behaviour of the corporations he so valorously fights against in his mind. The irony is at such critical levels of density it's amazing the entire state he resides in hasn't collapsed on itself in a black hole. D) He enforces it indiscriminately, it's extremely questionable whether Disney infringed, and Peregrine shouldn't even have been contacted, they were on third tier grounds (they did NOT infringe, but they derived from SeExpr by Disney that was, at the time, connected indirectly (due to xGen) to a lawsuit. He IS patent trolling, don't buy into his campaign presenting himself as the little man against the evil corps, he's not. He might be little in terms of income, but he sure isn't a poor slighted soul fighting tooth and nail for his life. E) You heard one side of the story, and you are assuming all of it is true and unbiased. Colin has decided not to say more, Joe keeps going around digging his own grave by insulting people 360 degrees. F) The software patents world is an American thing tied to a rotten, outdated system that gets in the way of progress and informatic freedom everywhere else. Nobody except a few selected individuals and an even smaller number of large corporations benefits from them. Whenever someone goes so far out of his way to diminish and piss all over communities like the OSS one (because all they do is copy stuff, right? Linux, GrID, Alembic, PartIO, OpenSL, Apache, CPython, OpenVDB, OpenSubD... all highly derivative shit, right?) and then proceeds to paint himself as a victim of evil corporations (because Disney, with ILM, and Pixar underneath didn't release a shitton of original software and papers for free), what does he expect to be seen as if not as a gigantic internet tough guy prick? I'm not saying he is one, but he sure works hard to paint himself as one. Why shouldn't people be equally prickly in response? It's only in the natural order of the internets that people anabashedly take the piss or attack him, he does the same routinely and aggresively. Enough to figure it out now? :) On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 1:33 AM, Eric Deren <eric_l...@dzignlight.com>wrote: > Nah, Joe Alter already holds this... >> > > I still have yet to figure out why folks unabashedly slam Joe. Yes, there > are patent trolls and yes, there are serious problems with our patent > system, but after evaluating the entire situation after the Yeti deal > collapsed (which was unfortunate), it seems to me that, in general, Joe is > the "little guy" that the best parts of our decrepit patent system support. > > Before the Yeti thing, his patent basically kept several large studios > from outright stealing his work and giving him no compensation for it. > Isn't that the ideal situation for patents? Protecting the little guy > from the big conglomerate corporations? > > I don't want to turn this into a political discussion but this "evil Joe > Alter" thread came up on a neighboring VFX list that Joe was actually on, > and when he calmly presented his case it actually made a lot of sense. Yeti > is an unfortunate causality to this situation, but this doesn't mean that > Joe is a patent troll... I mean, he did the actual work and makes money > from competing products based on that work. I'm all for open-source stuff > and I think if someone wants to go down that route, more power to them. > All of my released work has been released as such. But that doesn't mean > that if someone wants the protection of the law for their creation they > should be denied that. Methinks if his detractors actually held patents > they would have a different opinion of him. > > My 0.02. > > -Eric >
