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

Re:"patents threatening the public domain"

[General Wesc]

wikipedia's 'Public domain' article says that it applies to patents as well ('knowledge': scientific inventions, Edison, &c.)

Most proof that patents suck

[ctr2sprt]

What I would like to see is a system that differentiates between patents a company intends to implement and those it just wants to prevent others from implementing. It's being used by some companies almost like the DMCA. In fact, it could be used in exactly the same way. ("Method for Decrypting CSS-Encrypted DVD Video Discs.")

Anyway, it would be interesting if the lifespan of a patent depended on whether you were using it in any products you sell. For example, you might have two years to start selling products based on the patent. If you weren't selling any by that time, the patent expires. But if you were, you'd get three extra years to enjoy your monopoly. It would reduce the harmful effect of bad patents, but it would really encourage rolling them out into actual products. And it would all but eliminate "far-off" patents, patents on stuff that won't even be technologically possible two years from now.

Incidentally, the idea - though with bigger numbers - could be extended to apply to copyright as well. If a work goes five years without being generally available, the copyright expires. Otherwise, you get to keep the copyright for as long as you live (but no longer!). If the copyright holder's not an individual, you get, say, 50 years. It'd sure cause some interesting rebranding. Let's say 50 years from now Windows is still alive and kicking. Well, as soon as it hits that magic number, it becomes public domain. So to prevent that, you might release it under a new name every 10 years or so, to "keep it fresh." But of course, five years after you make the switch, the previous incarnation becomes public domain. And I can see some hotshot twentysomething CEO of an incredibly successful startup putting all the copyrights in his name, because he's probably going to live more than 50 years... and he dies in a car crash the next day.

Ah, but this, like the flat tax, is just another interesting idea that will never in a million years be implemented. (Maybe I should patent it just in case.)

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

[10101001 10101001]

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.