EFF's Patent Busting Targets Nintendo, Solitaire Patents

Thanks to the EFF site for its list of 'Patent Busting's Most Wanted' miscreants, the top ten patents "that pose the biggest threat to the public domain", as previously mentioned in a Slashdot mainpage post. However, Slashdot Games-relevant entries worth investigating further include an entry on Nintendo, accused of "threatening reverse engineering of videogames to promote interoperability and emulation by hobbyists and entrepreneurs like Crimson Fire Entertainment and Gambit Studios", and an entry on Sheldon F. Goldberg, accused of "claiming to own basic online gaming architecture [as well as Solitaire]." The article indicates: "EFF's team of lawyers and technologists will be tracking down prior art and preparing to petition the Patent and Trademark Office for revocation of these offenders' patents."

Comments

Nintendo made the GBA so why can't they patent it?

[jkeyes]

I understand that some patents are bad and all by why go after Nintendo for patenting something THEY made? I mean they created GBA so they should be allowed to control it everywhere. I usually agree with the EFF but I think they're severly misguided on this one.

Re:Nintendo made the GBA so why can't they patent

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First off, the patent itself that Nintendo has is for various techniques to help in emulating a GBA on an underpowered handheld. So, Nintendo doesn't actually have a patent on all GBA emulators.

Now, with that out of the way, why should Nintendo have such a patent? Nothing in Nintendo's patent looks novel. There's already tons of emulators written to operate on underpowered systems. Most the x86 emulators on the Mac dynamically recompile x86 instructions to PPC (or 68k for the older ones). Ideas such as frame skipping or taking advantage of arch specific speed-ups isn't new. The concept and its points aren't new.

But, lets take it a step further, and go to your question about whether Nintendo should be allowed to patent the GBA entirely. If you know much about the GBA, you'd see that the only really new part about the GBA over say the GB is the BIOS, having timers, and having DMAs. More colors and various sprite modes are pretty natural extensions to the GB as a progression into better colors. Timers and DMAs while new to the GB line, aren't particullary ingenious to have on a video console. So the only thing left is the BIOS, but the BIOS is a software work and is copyrighted. There's nothing in the BIOS that's worthy of patent.

So, there doesn't seem to be any reason to go about allowing Nintendo to patent the GBA any more than it would have been to let IBM patent the PS/2 when it came out with its better sound and gfx. If you believe that every time someone comes along and slaps a few components together to make a system they have a right to patent it, then OEMs would end up patenting out every conceivable combination of hardware to lockout competitors.

As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo has no inherent right to being the sole makers of GBAs, be it in hardware or software. So long as someone makes clones of all the copyrighted material, why shouldn't they be able to compete too? Maybe if Nintendo does something novel enough to warrent locking out competitors for *20 years*, then I'll go along with you.

A point of disagreement

[LordZardoz]

"As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo has no inherent right to being the sole makers of GBAs, be it in hardware or software."

On this I will disagree with you, but I will concede that it is a potentially grey area. It falls in the same area as GM making an exact copy of the Toyota Prius, and calling it a Prius. It is not so much innovation as it is someone else trying to reap the benefit of anothers efforts to the detriment of the originator.

While I dont much care about a hobbiest making an emulator, I would say that no company should be able to make a GBA or GBA emulator for a profit without Nintendo's consent. Nintendo did the R&D on the Gameboy. Nintnedo marketed it and made it popular. Nintendo did all the legwork. Why the hell should another reap the profit from Nintendo's work?

If I make myself a nice big sandwich, I expect to be able to eat it. I would be mighty angry if you ate it. But if you make your own damn sanwhich and eat it, what do I care?

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Re:A point of disagreement

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It falls in the same area as GM making an exact copy of the Toyota Prius, and calling it a Prius.

A more apt comparison would be GM making the first SUV and then other companies making their own take of SUVs. There's nothing stopping an emulation from outdoing its predecessor. And making a clone isn't innovation, but making an SUV while innovation isn't particularly novel. The GBA could be called a mixture of the SNES and GB, really. It's new. And anyone who wants to make their own version that runs on the same fuel (aka games) has to minimally clone the behavior of the original.

To act like begetting behavior in hardware somehow makes it worthy of protection isn't sound. Of the budget Nintendo spent on the GBA, I would say more of Nintendo's prestige (ie, marketing) and general quality (ie, not making shoddy products) had a role in making the GBA a success than new developments. Or can you name me truly unique things about the GBA vs any other console?

And finally, if you make a nice big sandwich and I make a copy of it, it doesn't mean you can't eat your sandwich. It just means that less people are dependent on you for making that sandwich and one more person (me) can enjoy without worry of you dying tomorrow and taking the recipe to your grave. With patents, that's not a worry thanks to its openness, but to act like another person making the same sandwich as you by buying and taking apart your sandwich or by studying it through outside observation to make one's own should somehow be stopped because you made the sandwich first has the far reaching implication of making every new genre a patentable field which would ruin the progress of arts and sciences.