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.