Slashdot Mirror
Several Publishers Sued for Infringing 3D Patent
jok writes "According to a story on GameDaily, law firm McKool Smith is suing several publishers for infringing their patent on a "Method and Apparatus for Spherical Planning", filed in 1988. Among the companies being sued are several big names, such as Square Enix, Electronic Arts, Vivendi Universal, Sega."
Have lawyers finally realized "why sue (and win) for others if we can do the same thing for ourselves"?
Now the middlemen are selling direct! You own a patent, you file a lawsuit, and you take all the profits^H^H^H^H^H^H^H compensation.
The article has mentioned enough "common sense" and "ridiculous" so I guess we have get the point.
What's interesting is why/how did a law firm get this patent? Did it 'invent' 3D on monitor, or did it purchased the patent from a third party? The patent's inventor is "Waller, William G. (Portland, OR)" but McKool Smith is claiming these 12 companies infringed on their (not their client's) patent.
Either way, it's going to get ugly because this is a law firm, it probably has all the resources and knowledge to do well in court, and we all know owner-operators usually work harder.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
A few more such patents, and this will end up snowballing companies into realizing how futile their patents are.
Slowly, companies are beginning to realize that although they could make money suing people, they could also get sued by equally greedy asshats.
It's only a matter of time. You can only be so stupid.
This is blatant patent squatting, and it's completely asinine that this sort of thing is legal. The entire purpose is to make money without actually doing anything, and the end result is that it stifles innovation. The patent system in this country needs a major overhaul.
"The patent is ridiculously broad. It's purely McKool Smith trying to make money"
Actually, I don't want to waste my breath calling McKool Smith names. The big perpetrator here is the patent system and the patent offices who allows these general patents.
Underholdning.info
To give you an idea of where they are coming from, and it's purely money, here is the title of another article featuring McKool, Smith: Patent field yields high-tech gold"
I think that tells us that we will see more and more of this.
http://www.busyweather.com/
These innovative ideas should not be stifled due to lack of funds.
The patent system wasn't created to patent objects that never get created. It was made so that people who come up with an idea can create it and sell it with monopoly ownership on that idea for a limited ammount of time. It would be like Eli Whitney filing a patent for a mechanical methode of seperating coton seads from coton without inventing the coton gin.
Being able to patent an idea without having to have a working implementation stifles work because otherwise people who have the same idea and actually put the work in to develope a working implementation would have to pay money to those that just see where the market is going. Like the company that is saying that anyone who does streaming media owes them money. They saw where the market was going and patented the idea. They didn't make any form of product while other people did. Neither did they try to sell their concept to others. They are just trying to rake in money from liscensing for it.
Patents were made so that the ideas and knowlege behind something eventually reach the public domain. By not developing the knowlege and only patenting the idea, you are not doing this. You are stifling the system. Hence why there should be a working implementation.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
My brain got sore from reading that after the first few sentences, but in effect what they're saying is they've patented the multiplying of two 4x4 matrices, or the multiplying of a 3 or 4 component vector by a 3x4 or 4x4 component matrix -- which gives you your object space -> world space, or world space -> camera space transform (or the concatenation thereof).
Hello, this has been around since the fucking dawn of Cartesian math!
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
My first thought was "why the hell would a LAW FIRM file patent relating to digital image processing"? My second thought was "why would they wait over 16 YEARS to defend their patent"?
Not only is the patent itself flimsy at best, the way it is being used is obviously exploitation. Have we all lost sight of why patents were established in the first place? I don't recall the intention was to STIFLE innovation and provide an avenue to generate a sudden, large revenue stream for the patent holder.
Was not the original intent of the patent system to provide incentive for inventors to develop and produce their invention? Wasn't the idea to provide a temporary period of protection to the inventor to establish himself in the market for his invention without getting ripped off by an unscrupulous competitor?
I think that if I am right then the patent system should be overhauled and be more restrictive--especially since it was built around the invention of physical devices. Not just in what is patented, but how patents are granted.
If there already isn't such a provision in place, the patent applicant should be required to demonstrate his intent to USE the information in his patent. Before a patent is granted, I think there must be an "invention sponsor"--either an organisation set up by the inventor himself or an initial licensee--that submits a business plan or similar evidence that the invention will be used and marketed. The patent then could be provisionally granted for a short term (5 years maybe?) and at the end of this term, if there is no progress then the patent is expired and cannot be renewed (though an inventor could start the filing process from scratch).
I think that even if this sounds harsh, lawyers and unscrupulous businessmen have demonstrated they cannot be trusted with an overly permissive patent system. It is an obvious perversion of the system when the patent holder is obviously not in a business related to the patent and has gone for years with no licensee or partner to apply the invention. If patent holders want a high-level of protection for their ideas, I don't think it is too much to ask for them to provide a high-level of detail as to their intent in applying the patent.