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."

Comments

Vertical business model

[fembots]

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.

Re:That's what I was thinking!

[eln]

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.

Blame the patent system

[Underholdning]

"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.

High Tech Gold indeed

[erick99]

Here is an article that discusses how Kool, Smith uses data mining techniques to find patent violations. This is apparently the focus of their practice and the article mentions some of their clients.

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.

Re:From the patent

[LSD-OBS]

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!