Copyright Issues Ruin the Game Industry?

COMYY

http://news.mmosite.com/content/2015-12-24/copyright_issues_ruin_the_game_industry.shtml?flag=wb03

Even in the real world it is common to find out two persons looking quite alike, not to say in the virtual design of characters that two games shares something similar. Blizzard’s prosecution focuses on the copy of some famous scenes and many well known characters, while Blizzard as well as Valve failed to provide solid proof and the case was dismissed.

I'm really disagree with the author. On the contrary, the copyright infringement ruins the industry, that make game developers lazy to do unique games, just copycat. And This is the disaster of the whole game.

Cleffy

They don't just ruin the game industry. Patents and copyrights have ruined almost every business sector with frivolous lawsuits. It also defeats the original intent of these laws.
Patents were originally meant to facilitate the sharing of inventions which could prove beneficial to man-kind to share. Like sharing penicillin discovery. Before that companies would keep these secret so competitors would not bring it to market before they could reap the discovery. It was originally meant for science, technology, and medicine discoveries. It was strictly not allowed for design or art discoveries. All patents needed to be signed by the Secretary of State and had a life span of no more than 7 years. This of course has changed. The limit of 7 years is mostly enforced, but there are patents on nearly anything. Most of which should be tossed as junk patents or known discoveries. For instance rounded corners on smart phones would be a junk patent.

Copyrights were limited to a length of 14 years, and an additional 14 years if the author was still alive. It also allowed the creation of imitations. It pretty much protected the author to print their book without someone copying most of it in their own work. The length has been extended extensively, but the second provision has been in untouched during the last 200+ years. Basically, you can imitate a character but may not directly copy it. You could also do something like write fanfiction based on a character since it is not a copy of an existing book. Now that is more prohibited. Its how we get alternate stories of Dracula or Little Red Riding Hood.