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.

I'd like to see

[p51d007]

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.

Patent Troll list

[pr0nbot]

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

Prior Art anyone?

[Zeek40]

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?

Hey, remember when Universal Studios...

[sesshomaru]

Hey, remember when Universal Studios tried to sue Nintendo for infringing on their copyright on King Kong? And then Nintendo won the case, and proved that Universal didn't even hold the copyright on King Kong in the first place?

Good times, good times....

Re:Hey, remember when Universal Studios...

[kalirion]

Hehe, hadn't heard of this before, so looked it up. Pretty amusing case, thanks for bringing it up!

very creative

[Jon Luckey]

prior art-ish Applie IIe circuit

http://web.pdx.edu/~heiss/technotes/aiie/tn.aiie.0 6.html

Whoopie.

Because Fenner's patent used a tristate buffer instead of an open collector NPN transitor they own this kind of joystick?

geesh.

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=

Re:Prior art?

[UbuntuDupe]

Good idea. Remember, it's harder to defend a court order preventing a technology from being distributed if the only damages are loss of revenue, which is easy to correct later if it turns out it really infringes a patent. In other words, a "patent"holder will never ABSOLUTELY need the infringement to stop RIGHT NOW.

Also, it would be nice if a patent could be voided on the grounds that it was deliberately worded to obscure similarity to prior art.

Re:Prior art?

[thebdj]

Actually, I would argue that it is not the laws faults. At least not the way it is written. As written, 35 USC 103 explains obviousness in relatively good terms. Obviousness did not become an issue until relatively recently. I will not fault SCOTUS in Graham v. Deere, because the requirements they set forth were not very restrictive. The issue came later when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) including the requirement that the joining of the two items must be taught in the prior art.

This is an extremely rare thing and actually makes the requirement hard to fulfill. It actually limited the Graham Factor, "one of ordinary skill in the art," practically eliminating it. I do not think the CAFC truly thought this out before making a decision, because if you already the idea to combine the two technologies (and mention as much in your patent specification) then you would almost certainly have claimed it, which would make it a 35 USC 102 violation, something that is really easier to defend for a Patent Examiner.

I believe we are still waiting to see the end result of KSR v. Teleflex before SCOTUS. If SCOTUS rules with KSR and essentially says the CAFC over-stepped their bounds, then you could be looking at the mass invalidation of thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of patents. You mention the standard is hurting Microsoft and Sony, but it actually is helping another industry with as much if not more money. The pharamaceuticals and bio-tech companies love the standard as it is because it helps them get a lot of patents on new drugs passed. I believe if you review the documents from KSR v. Teleflex, you will find support for KSR's writ from a group that included Microsoft, while the big pharma's filed in opposition (supporting Teleflex).

Re:Prior art?

[MoxFulder]

The "game port" joysticks for old x86 boxes worked the exact same way! The joystick axis was basically a variable resistor, and its position would vary the time constant of an RC circuit. The voltage would drain at a rate dependent on the joystick position, and you used a do-nothing timing loop to wait for the voltage to fall past a threshold and flip a bit.

I remember trying to learn to program the PC joystick in assembly language around 1993, and it was a real pain in the ass to get it right. You had to constantly poll the joystick and put in all kinds of delay loops. Apparently, proper analog-to-digital converters were very expensive when the PC game port was designed, and so this crude circuit design was used instead. See the wikipedia article for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port#Circuits

Bottom line: this patent ain't new technology. In fact, it's OBSOLETE technology. There are much better ways to get an analog measurement from a joystick, and there were even in 1998 when the patent was filed.

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:This is junk

[PFI_Optix]

From the patent:

Filing date: Jul 10, 1998

Does more really need to be said?

Prior art... Nintendo 64

[gozar]

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.

Re:Capping the maximum damages awarded.

[TheThiefMaster]

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.

Its called "reexamination"

[kansas1051]

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.

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.

Re:This is junk

[Anonymous Coward]

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.