Joystick Port Patented, Now the Lawsuit

Panaqqa writes "It appears that Fenner Investments, a Texas based patent troll, is at it again. This time, they are suing Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo for infringing a patent they hold on joystick ports. Perhaps they felt they needed a "Plan B" now that their lawsuit against Juniper Networks, Nokia, Cisco, Alcatel and Ericsson is not going so well."

Comments

Hopefully we see more of this

[baffled]

It's probably the best bet for patent reform to be taken seriously.

Prior art?

[Joce640k]

I don't know the exact circuit details but Commodore Amiga joysticks worked in a similar way, i.e. by timing the decay of a capacitor rather then using an a/d converter.

Re:Prior art?

[Smidge204]

Right now, it only seems that these cases will show if the accused party actually infringes on the patent or not.

What we need, as part of patent reform, is the ability to call BS on a patent during these lawsuits, which puts the infringement claim on hold until the patent itself is reviewed and debated over. Start a seperate court case to review the patent, with both parties able to produce evidence and expert testimony about the technology in question. If the patent is ruled bogus, then it should be invalidated on the spot and the infringement suit dropped.

That would cull a lot of bogus patents and maybe discourage filing them in the first place.
=Smidge=

It's been done before

[rongage]

As near as I can tell from the text of the patent, this patent troll has patented the use of an Analog to Digital Convertor for converting the analog output of a joystick into a digital signal. I'm not 100% certain but it sounds like either an integrator type circuit or a PWM type circuit. The intriguing bit is the mentioned use of a VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip as a part of the design. This could mean utilizing any of the large fabric chips from the likes of Altera, TI, or Lord knows how many others are in the market nowadays. Heck, this could be interpreted to include the PIC chips in common use nowadays.

I'd have to look in my old college electronics book (Electronic Communications - vol 5 by Schrader) to see, but I think these types of ADC circuits were discussed even back then (circa 1985). If not, I know the Peavey DECA series of digital power amplifiers (circa 1988) utilized an integrator type ADC for doing converting the analog audio signal to a series of digital pulses (PWM) used for driving the MOSFET finals.

This is the patent office's fault

[RobK]

The fact that these non-novel, obvious patents with prior art are being issued decades after first use.

I understand that business need to protect themselves, and I'm a lot more forgiving of hardware patents (because that make sense) but reading the patent all I see that MIGHT be new is the power saving circuitry rather than a novel joystick connection.

They do need more examiners and the second patent applied for each year should cost twice as much as the first to file. (This would curb blanketing the system hoping that one of them sticks).

This is my theory and it's mine.

Re:Business based on law suites

[scoove]

Is it just me or does this speak so clearly to the culture we have developed in the US?

Not really. Parasites exist in most systems and represent a legitimate (though culturally reprehensible) strategy in game theory, economics, etc. "Patent trolls" exemplify parasitic behavior by trying to obtain resources (cash, reputation) without being responsible for original productive work. They live off of others efforts through a less-than-equitable exchange.

Think about how long criminal organizations have coerced others through various rackets - Mafia "insurance" rackets (e.g. pay me for fire insurance so Tony here won't burn your business down tonight). To many, this behavior is wrong (it certainly introduces greater inefficiencies), but at a minimal level, it provides the benefit of killing off the weak. Economies really want to see the weak removed as it punishes bad strategy and allows those who made better decisions to attain their reward. Parasitism is also a moderate risk strategy for those that speculate on the patent troll organizations as their capital invested to pay the legal bills is very much at total risk.

It just sounds like this corporation exists only to gather every patent it can get it's hands on

The real disappointment is that the U.S. legal system does not provide an opportunity for greater risk than the invested capital paid into these speculative patent troll firms. For example, if this firm loses in the joystick litigation and goes bankrupt, all those who invested in it only lose their capital they intentionally placed at risk. If you put in $100K for your shares, you're out $100K. A "loser pays" judicial system would help reduce repeat behavior as a troll firm once successful would likely rather liquidate and take the gains after one win, rather than expose it all to a second, so this type of reform would not really address the core problem.

I'd advocate a personal liability provision similar to the attestation liability that public corporation executives now have due to Sarbanes Oxley (e.g. they are personally at risk to significant criminal penalties for the integrity of their company's financial statements). If you really believe in your claims and seek to litigate on the patent issue, you'll be required to place a $500K bond with the court which will be forfeit if your case is determined to be frivolous. Combine this exposure with dramatically increased sanctions against attorneys for polluting the system with this junk (e.g. one year suspension of their license for the first offense) and you'll reduce this parasitism to a more normal frequency.

Fixing the system

[bcharr2]

You would think it was possible to put our nations academic institutions into the patent review loop.

Company applies for patent, patent judge receives comments from university departments focused on that type of technology, judge reviews comments to verify if this is a revolutionary new idea worth granting a patent to or not.

I also liked the suggestion that the cost of patenting scale up the more patents one files within a given timeframe. This should keep a company from essentially conducting a "denial of patent review" attack by filing so many similar patents that the academics will simply give up participating in the system.

I would also like to see some sort of financial pentalty applied to corporations who attempt to patent existing work. In this case, if the court finds the patent should never have been granted, I would accompany the dismissal of their lawsuit with a hefty fine. Force companies to conduct solid research instead of just filing some paperwork and seeing what they can slip through the system.