[mooman219]

I was caught off guard by this! It just always felt like simplex noise was just perlin v2 and I never thought twice about the legal status of it. The 2022-01-08 Anticipated expiration is definitely something to look forward to here, especially since the current owner (an investment firm) appears to have >100 ongoing patent litigation cases, with patents as vague as network load balancing.

Reading the patent itself, there's definitely some weirdness to it, like how specific it is about application to texturing. I believe heightmaps would be acceptable (IANAL).

In slightly unrelated news, a bunch of Microsoft patents on fonts expired last October.

[jdboyd]

As a matter of safety, I never read non-expired patents to avoid possible willful infringement.