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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."
It's probably the best bet for patent reform to be taken seriously.
someone sue the lawyers bringing up these lawsuits...since they are driving us nuts, and crippling businesses. If there ever was a need for "looser pays" it's because of crap like this.
Wikipedia page on Patent Trolls, with a list that doesn't appear to include the trolls in question guys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll
The patent was applied for in 1998, I believe the first atari consoles had joysticks in the late 70s, and I'm sure there are earlier examples. The only thing that the patent application seems to have going for it is the specific use of CMOS fabrication for the circuit. This seems to me like making a keyboard out of metal/wood/some other material not usually used, then trying to patent it. Am I missing something, or will this lawsuit go just as well as their previous one?
Good times, good times....
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
prior art-ish Applie IIe circuit
0 6.html
http://web.pdx.edu/~heiss/technotes/aiie/tn.aiie.
Whoopie.
Because Fenner's patent used a tristate buffer instead of an open collector NPN transitor they own this kind of joystick?
geesh.
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
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.
No sig today...
Is it just me or does this speak so clearly to the culture we have developed in the US?
How does this relate to the culture of the US? Sure, there are some companies that are trying to make money as patent trolls, just as there are always people trying to get a quick buck. But the vast majority of Americans are never a party to a patent lawsuit.
The idea that you can only get ahead by suing the pants off of some corporation.
There are a lot of companies out there that innovate and compete in order to get ahead. Just because there are a few examples of cases like the above does not mean that it's the standard operating procedure for a business.
In typical slashdot style, somebody has taken a situation, and extrapolated it out to now cover the entire population of the United States. The above case sure does seem frivalous, and it in no way represents the culture in the US.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
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.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
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.
From the patent:
Filing date: Jul 10, 1998
Does more really need to be said?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Their patent applies to analog joysticks. It's a method of sending the information of a joystick's position as a digital pulse, therefore requiring less wiring for multiple analog sticks and buttons. The controller could send the information about the various states of the buttons and joysticks encoded as a digital stream.
Unfortunately for them, they applied for the patent in '98, long after the N64 was released. I don't know for sure, but since the N64 controller only has (IIRC) 3 wires in the cable, they must be using something like what this patent describes.
It's interesting that they applied for the patent two months after the release of the dual-shock controller for the PS1. IMO, someone saw the dual shock and patented the idea on how it would work.
What, me worry?
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.
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.
Except that that would mean that companies that could afford $5M easily could intentionally infringe on as many patents as they liked, even drawing the legal battle out long enough to bankrupt the holder.
The U.S. Patent Office has such a procedure -- its called "reexamination." "Inter parties" reexamination allows two parties (the patentee and an accused infringer) to "reexamine" a patent before the USPTO in view of new prior art. If the USPTO agrees with the accused infringer, it can invalidate the patent. Lawsuits regarding patents in reexamination are commonly stayed (i.e. put on hold) until the reexamination terminates.
Reexams often result in dubious patents being invalidated. The reason you do not read about them more often on /. is that the purported prior art is often grossly exaggerated by the accused infringer (as in the RIM/NTP patent case), so there may not actually be sufficient grounds to invalidate the patent.
Not really. Parasites exist in most systems and represent a legitimate (though culturally reprehensible) strategy in game theory, economics, etc.
That's true, but I think the parent was referring to the lawsuit lottery mentality whereby people dream of ways to snare wealthy corporations by suing them in unanticipated ways and thus get rich. In the US, no jury's findings are binding on another's, so if the first jury says, "placing a warning this way would have sufficed", and the corporation switches to that way, the next jury is free to rape it again for insufficient warning. Plus, juries are likely to rule out of sympathy ("Well, the doctor didn't really do anything wrong, but gee, it would really suck to be the patient now, and gosh, those insurance companies sure have unlimited money, so what the hell...") or desire for fame ("Hey, we can't get on Oprah unless we rule against the big evil corporation, and gosh, isn't that plaintiff's attorney so sweet the way he smiles...").
Does it happen in other countries? Sure, but not nearly as often. For example, Japan has a similarly developed economy but only a fraction of the lawyers per capita and "investment" in the legal system.
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.
Well, it provides the "benefit" of killing off those who are weak *along a certain dimension*, but being weak along that dimension rarely means you're a drain on the economy somehow. Sure, Mr. Viklstein can't defend his bank against arsonists, but that doesn't mean he's a drain on the economy.
That said, I agree there should be a sort of "loser pays" system for frivolous suits like you've suggested.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
We need a 'use it or lose it' mentality to patents. If you patent a new type of mouse and it's 7 years later and somebody else is selling these mice and you haven't done shit with yours... then too bad so sad. This will eliminate these patent trolls.
nothing
They should sue the US Airforce for using joysticks in fighter planes. Maybe some pilot will get angry and press the launch button to solve the whole problem once and for all...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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From my inspection of the patent, it appears that their "invention" is supposed to allow a joystick which operates with a 5 V supply to interface to a circuit which does not operate on a 5 V supply.
This isn't just obvious, it's necessary! Anyone even half-assed skilled in the art would know that you need to do something to connect a 5 V TTL output to a 3.3 V LVTTL input.
Okay, so maybe their something is novel or nonobvious. In fact, it's neither; they're using a tri-state buffer's threshold voltage as a comparator.
Basically, digital logic circuits can have any manner of analog voltages applied to them. Circuit designers specify these voltages as Vil (voltage input low threshold) and Vih (voltage input high threshold). Any input voltage below Vil will generate an digital output voltage below Vol (voltage output low), which is usually interpreted as logic 0. Any input voltage above Vih will, correspondingly, generate a voltage above Voh, which is usually interpreted as logic 1.
They specify that their buffer has hysteresis, so that way it won't suffer from the metastability that usually occurs when you feed a digital circuit an input voltage between Vil and Vih.
Keep in mind that these components are all COTS (common-off-the-shelf) parts.
They just drain a capacitor, which causes the input of the buffer to go below Vil, so the buffer outputs a logic 0, which raises a PCin bit (whose voltage level is not the 5V joystick level), let the capacitor charge through the potentiometer whose resistance is proportional to the current joystick position (which cap is being charged by a 5V supply), and when the charging capacitor exceeds Vih of the input buffer, the buffer outputs a logic 1, causing the PCin bit to go low again.
There's some miscellaneous stuff about resetting, the order in which to apply signals to make the process work, etc. But, basically, the whole patent is bollocks.
I also like how they have a small piece in their patent filing about how those skilled in the art will see obvious ways to modify their patent's invention, and that these modifications are still "in the spirit" of what the patent covers and are thus covered by the patent.
:(){
This patent is a monopoly on something obvious. No, it's not quite a "patent on the joystick port" if you read it (but don't read it, if you read it they could get triple damages!) (amigas and other platforms had analogue and digital joysticks in the 1980s of course, so it would be instantly invalidated if that was all it was).
However, it is still neither non-obvious nor particularly inventive, to the people whose opinion should count (of course, the people whose opinions count in the USA are MBAs, PHBs, Lawyers and just about anyone other than engineers!).
Asking USPTO folk to judge patent novelty is a bit like those stereotypical primitives on a tropical island who are wowed by the god-like power of motor boats and airplanes. People judging the validity of patents are, almost necessarily, unqualified: the people who would be qualified either detest patents (most engineers, not just in software, btw) or can earn far more actually working as engineers or both. So you end up with, well, weenies, in charge of handing out 20 year monopolies.
but not in a good sense.
An explanation for those who don't want to read the patent:
An anlog joystick is pretty much a variable resistor. In order to convert this into a digital domain, the resistance must be measured. We know that the resistor itself can be used to change the discharge time of a capacitor -- this is common. Meauring the discharge time means determining the time the capacitor goes from one voltage to a lower voltage. Which, by its very nature is a "pulse".
And this patent seems to cover all such interfaces in the "joystick" domain.
Now, I can come up with alternate methods for reading the resistance. First one (off the top of my head), is to use a series of resistors controlled by a latched value to produce a reference voltage which is then sent through the joystick resistance. The final output is run through a gate which triggers at a reference voltage. Via search, we can determine the target joystick resistance. (I would probably use a binary search). But this is not any where NEAR as simple or obvious as the R-C approach.
Now, the R-C approach has been used for other variable resistors (prior to 1998) -- the "joystick" application is the only new thing. I used it myself in the 80's. Just never for a joystick (not being into gaming). Its main benefits are that it needs only a single input pin and the circuit is simple. But, given those constraints it is obvious.
Oh well -- go patent trolls. Sure glad I am not in the US.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Few things to point out here. 1) I don't know who filed the infringement on this patent. 2) I am one of the inventors of this patent (DLPotts from Royersford, PA). I have no idea how they expect this to fly in court. Why? The idea of the patent directly ties to JOYSTICK PORTS on PC's, and NOTHING else. The Joystick port on the PC is a 5volt open collector port that uses sampled time to determine if the potentiometer has moved or not. Eventually the semiconductors involved dropped to 3.3 volt and thus the Joystick port would not function any more. The Patent reflects how the port had to be modified to accept a current joystick (ones designed to run on 5 volt) and still be accurate. The idea behind the design was not to stop people from inventing a low voltage joystick such as Nintendo, Sony and MS have done, but a way to use the (then current) joysticks in future systems. Since none of the game consoles involved actually use "PC JOYSTICK" ports (they have created their own ports), and they are not interfacing to the analog PC joysticks of the time; there is no way that this would ever stand up in court. I would also like to give a shout out to Jalil Fadavi of this patent too; he lost his battle to cancer a few months back.. He was a great man.