• 0 Posts
  • 2 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 19th, 2023

help-circle
  • IANAL, and this is oversimplifying. Copyright protects the creative elements of a game, including the specific way that a game is coded (so you cannot decompile a game, modify all the art assets, change the code a little, and then sell it), and possibly aspects of the gameplay required to give it a specific “feel”.

    If you want a solid legal defense for cloning, you could have one team that describes the original game in a way that removes the creative elements, and a second team that works from that description to make a new work. This works for other works, too; I can write my own “book about an orphan that learns he has magical powers, goes to a school to learn to use those, and ultimately battles and defeats the powerful dark wizard that killed his parents”, but can’t sit down following the story elements of Harry Potter for my new Barry Cotter book series.

    Ultimately the line is what you can convince a judge and/or jury is “different enough”.


  • At least in the US, government policy has meant that getting a drug to market is an extremely high bar. This means that funding the wrong drug can waste a billion dollars or more of time, material, trained researchers and lab space, etc.

    Funding drugs by popular attention, private donation, kickstarter, or anything like that is likely to produce a bunch of scams and even more waste.

    Funding drugs by having the government select which ones to study is likely to produce several gigantic financial boondoggles that are dragged on because some Senator wants the jobs wasting the money creates to remain in his state, or something.

    If we want more drugs to come out, the best thing to do would be to reduce the cost of making a drug legal to sell, like by lowering the proof required for efficacy, or by alleviating the doctor shortage by permanently increasing the number of medicare funded residency slots.