While I don’t know Japanese law, and folks are right in US law about prior art, I think everyone is missing the point.
Companies like Nintendo don’t have to actually win. They probably created this patent as a throw away to force Pocketpair to waste money fighting it. It costs tons of money to hire an attorney, work through the process, etc. It takes YEARS.
Nintendo probably wants to waste Pocketpair’s time and money OR they’re trying to get them to just settle and give Nintendo a cut of the profits.
That’s how big tech works with tons of patents and how patent trolls keep leeching off society. I have a patent for a button, you have a phone you’re making. I say give me 1% of your profit. What’s 1% to you? You agree, we don’t go to court and the next person that does it I do the same thing, but now I show them how many people agreed and that person is scared and think I have a legit case.
This shit is constantly happening in the background nonstop.
Patent law, copyright law, they are fundamentally broken. But they won’t get fixed until something BIG happens.
Nintendo is and always has been a bully. This is just another instance of it.
First off, yes, the title of the post is misleading. Mozilla is creating a privacy focused ad system. However, I legit don’t get who this is for.
As a user, I’m not turning off my adblockers. Yes, privacy is important. I’m ok with some ads, but I’m not going to risk my privacy and security, because it’s not like I’ll have a clue who is backing said ads. So it’s not for me.
Normal users have shown that they really don’t care, let alone have any kind of clue what’s going on. So it’s not for them.
Advertisers have huge incentive to show you targeted ads. They don’t want to show someone an ad on the other side of the planet for something they don’t have access to. Also why would they want to show you an ad for something completely unrelated. What’s the incentive for them to give up their targeted ads?
It’s not like Mozilla is poising themselves for any kind of government oversight. I’m in the US, and the US gov doesn’t seem to give a shit. And the EU, while they have GDPR and they’re fining companies left and right, it doesn’t seem like they’re really targeting these kinds of ads. Outside of those two I don’t know anything about other countries honestly.
So again, I have zero clue who this is for or why Mozilla thinks this will be successful. There’s no incentive or knowledge that this is needed.
I use Firefox. I run Linux. I’m not trying to bash Mozilla here. I’m not trying to be a naysayer. I’m just trying to understand what kind of real world use case this solves and incentivizes users and advertises to use it over the alternatives.