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Google, Yahoo, Others Sued Over Solitaire Patent
An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2004, Slashdot posted about computer solitaire being patented. It was a ridiculous patent and made it onto the EFF's list of worst patents. However, not much had been heard about that patent until now. It turns out that the patent holder, Sheldon Goldberg, is now using that patent to sue a bunch of different online publications, including Digg, eBaum's World, the NY Times, Cnet and the Washington Post. He's also suing Google, Yahoo and AOL (why not?)."
Thats too stupid.
I DEMAND SOMEONE KILL HIM!
with a deck of cards.
Why don't they go after microsoft too? They've been distributing a computer solitaire game for many years in clear violation of this patent, and they have plenty of money to sue them for!
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
We have a fly-by-night organisation, suing at least eight major companies, with a patent that is clearly a joke.
Our legal system works as much by precedent as by legislation.
When the NYT, CNet and Google fight this as hard as they are going to, this will set that precedent, and it will set it hard. It will make it that bit harder for frivolous patents to ever reach court, and might, just might, prompt a re-evaluation of the entire system.
One of the patents is for a method for playing games on a network. Network gaming systems have been around for as long as networks. For example, in 1977 there was a little game called MUD.
Obviousness in to the US patent office is of course different than the rest of humanity.
My little Linux and tech blog
Techdirt has more: details. To add to the conversation, it also asserts a "networked gaming system" but again that's pure bollocks as Quake and Doom before it obviously provide prior art even for that!
Shh.
My Clubs. Let me show you them.
that's the brilliant part of their invention i assume. adding a network part to a game you can only play alone. it's pure genius!
I don't like the idea of owning ideas and other things that do not exist, but if we have to have a patent system, then I think there should be a "use it or lose it" element to the patent system. If you can prove that you are trying to make a product out of it, or have licensed it to someone who is trying to make a product out it, then you are allowed to approach the courts to try to have your patents enforced. Otherwise, all bets are off.
70% of patent actions are by people who stockpile patents but produce no products. These patent trolls are just leeches are should not be allowed to hinder real companies who actually make things.
My little Linux and tech blog
To patent chess or checkers? How about tick tac toe? Yes it's a new use for it but you might as well say printing on ePaper requires a separate copyright since it was never copyrighted specifically for that purpose. There has to be a limit set on persuing these claims as well. You shouldn't be able to wait until lots of deep pockets are involved for multiple years to sue so you know the damages will be high. The absolute maxium should be 12 months since a product was released but they should be required to give notice the moment they are aware of the infringement. Solitare is like traditional folk music which can't be copyrighted. It's been around too long and simply doing a computer version isn't changing it enough to warrant a patent. The code would be patentable but not the game. If they were all stealing code then that's a different issue.
As dumb as it seems, I cannot really be mad at anyone who actually gets to sue ebaums. I've never been a fan of the way he treats IP rights-holders.
As unlikely as it may seem, Microsoft could be a saviour in this case. If I remember correctly, its (rather good) implementation of patience solitaire has been in Windows since 1990. Far before the patent was issued. So there.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
The term is limited, to a period of 20 years. As an incentive not to keep the patent in force for any longer than necessary (and to pay for the patent system and bring in some tax money), there is a renewal fee to be paid every year or in odd cases (US) every couple of years. The fee gets higher the longer you want to keep the patent in force.
Patent terms are way more reasonable than copyright terms. And for a patent you have to meet high standards (OK, in some countries they sometimes make a joke out of that) and it is quite costly. Now, compare that to copyright. It doesn't cost anything, doesn't require registration and lasts for all practical purposes forever.
As to the HIV issue you mention. Just about any patent law has an article allowing the government to step in and end the monopoly prematurely. This is not done for trivial reasons, but in case of say - a bird flue epidemic - a patentee cannot hold a country at ransom. Brazil did it recently when some drug company insisted on charging too much.
Bert
Traditional patents does most damage when the patent holder release some poor and overpriced product only few can and will afford, basically holding back the benefits of the invention for the duration of the patent.
I believe induction cooking was delayed that way, because the holder of a key patent only used it in its own very exclusive brand, and refused to license it to cheaper brands with better distribution channels.
It is much better if the patent holder has no products of its own, and instead offers patents to everyone on RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms.
Even better, of course, would be to do away with the patents.
The patent office pooped big time when this patent was granted. As long as there are patents, that problem will never be solved, but there are other ways it might be dealt with.
...
In some jurisdictions, "loser pays costs" is a way of inhibiting frivolous lawsuits. I'm not inclined to favor this, because one may too easily lose a case that has real merit, but
How about a provision where, if the case is duly found to be unusually frivolous, or glaringly without merit, loser pays triple the costs of the defendant and court?
And nothing of value was lost.
Dude if there's anything on this planet that qualifies for prior art it's suing for patent infringement. They're the ambulance chasers of the tech world.
You are talking right :-)
;-)
...this patent troll's trolling?
Seriously, I see no way that anyone would do something like this to do anything besides prove a point. It would be like someone being sued over the 'circular transportation facilitation device' patent from a few years ago.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
The U. S. Congress has added an additional term of up to 5 years to the normal 20-year patent term for pharmaceutical patents. This is designed to prevent financial losses from the additional time it takes a pharmaceutical manufacturer to get a new drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration eating up a substantial portion of overall patent life.
Overall, this may be fair. Concerns include whether the variable additional term awarded is sometimes not a close match for the time actually taken in a given case, what happens if the FDA takes over 5 years, and whether there are other industries deserving similar adjustments and not getting them.
Who is John Cabal?
According to EFF, the date to beat to show prior art is January 19, 1996. In 1994 Microgaming Software Systems released the first online casino in 1994.
http://www.gov.im/ebusiness/microgaming.xml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgaming
Any other cited examples of prior art? Help shut down this asshat and contribute your prior art info to: http://w2.eff.org/patent/wanted/contribute.php?p=sheldon
Or perhaps we just need to put a bounty on lawyers.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Despite the oxymoronic name, there does exist a fun multiplayer variant of Klondike solitaire. Each person plays their own deck and columns, but the stacks where you put cards in A-2-3-...-J-Q-K order are shared. Each ace starts a new stack, so there can be multiple partially complete stacks for each suit. The first player to get all of their cards out of their columns and onto any of the stacks wins. It's fast-paced and competitive.
Emulate them, get ridiculous patents and then sue everyone you can. Eventually you'll make patents worthless enough and be enough of a pain in the ass that there will be a change in the law.
The other thing is to file as many patents as possible with as little money as possible to gag the patent office.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
The only way I see the BS in software patents (and unbalanced copyright) coming to light is by the people who know the system doing the hard work of moving things along and educating the judiciary and public. The EFF is doing this. We can never contribute enough to compare to what the bad guys' lawyers have, but we don't have to. Just enough to knock some sense into people.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
I missed the license part. Not sure how the GGP proposal would help then, presumably the patent trolls will try to get people to license their patents as well (that is how they get money from them).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImagiNation_Network
Since a few minutes of search can often break a bogus patent, I'd argue that the patent system itself is working OK.
lawsuits should be forced to pay everyones else's costs and then be banned from the court. Eh Daryl?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
"Use it or lose it" doesn't mean "make it or lose it", it can also mean "actively promote or license it" as well.
Could someone clarify -- when this gets thrown out (hopefully), won't the companies be entitled to get payback from the guy for all the money they spent fighting the suit? Given that these companies probably have the best lawyers in the biz, couldn't this figure be in the hundreds of thousands?
This is an outrage! Tell the King! Tell the Queen!
Let me get this straight... Rushing for diamonds? That's no way to win hearts and minds. That takes patience.
In fact, if they carry on like this, some hot-headed ./er is gonna club them to death with a spade.
I really hope that a court loss is on the cards for them. And if they whine, I say 'Deal with it'.
I don't usually spend my time playing solitaire, but I today I'm gonna play a couple games. It's just my own silly little way of telling Mr. Goldberg to go to hell.
Card games like these were implemented on Plato (University of Illinois educational system from the 70s/80s/90s) in the late 70s and 80s. They were called inter-terminal games. The terminals were all connected back to the mainframe. If you want to argue that the terminals were just display devices (512x512 plasma screens with keyboards and touch panels) there were also plenty games written for the PlatoV/IST/Viking terminals (later generation terminals that had 8080 or z80 procs in them that you could run downloaded code on).
Networked ranking systems have existed on Plato since shortly after the first inter-terminal games were written.
Patents like these are stupid because there is prior art available.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
They should toss patent abusers into solitaire... confinement.
Ouch.
No sig for you!!
It's more difficult than that.
... but it doesn't need to be as bad as the current law.
1) The current patent system is broken in ALL industries, but some sort of patent system is probably desirable.
2) For inventions that require a lot of up-front investment, a longer patent is more justifiable.
3) For industries that don't require the patent to reveal sufficient information to allow others to reproduce the invention easily, patents should be invalid.
4) When the system requires a patent lawyer to understand what the patent means, individuals who are not patent lawyers should not be affected.
5) There are a lot of undefined terms in the area of patents. These should be removed. Examples are "obvious", "skilled in the art". These need to either be made more precise, or removed from patent law...and if they are only well-defined to lawyers or patent-lawyers, then the laws containing those terms should only apply to lawyers or patent-lawyers.
A lot of these problems stem from the problem that nobody can define what a patentable invention is. As long as this is true, you're going to have either bad patent law or none
But remember, some things are cheap to copy, but expensive to invent. It's for the protection of these that patent law is reasonable. And it's unfair to second-guess how expensive it *should* have been to invent after the fact.
Sometimes I think a patent should be not a license to manufacture, but a prize, rather like the X-prise. Each year in January congress should appropriate a certain amount of money, during the next January the "Patent Prize Commission" should allot that money among those filing for inventions during that year. It would be necessary to reveal sufficient information to allow others to copy the invention cheaply (i.e., without going through either the process of invention or of reverse engineering). If you don't win, your process remains your secret. You can file as often as you desire until you have won, but there's a fee for each filing that is estimated to cover twice the cost of handling and evaluation. If two or more entries in the same year are essentially identical (in the judgment of the judges), and it is still deemed a worthy invention, then the prize is split. All winning entries become public domain.
I'm not really sure that the prize would be better than the current system, but it's hard to see how it could be worse.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Keep the government out of my ideas!
Blar.
Klondike is hardly the only solitaire card game, and once it becomes multiplayer it, by definition, ceases to be a solitaire game.
I used to play two-player Klondike a bunch IRL, but we never called it solitaire.
Karma: Non-Heinous
If you had 128K Mac in 1984, you could have played Klondike; the first solitaire game for the Mac, and that would predate Mr. Goldberg's patent by over ten years.
There is no security when liberty is sacrificed.
I suspect you could find examples of various card games on NovaNet http://www.pearsondigital.com/novanet/, many of which would predate the Internet by perhaps ten years. Cyber1 has a Chess lesson running, so there's one that probably came from NovaNet. I wonder how many turn-based games run on bulletin boards in the early 80s also would qualify as prior art.
This case really seems like an attempt to make somebody pay money to make this go away. Is certainly can't succeed, can it?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
lameness filter encountered.
That he commit sepuku with a deck of cards!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
It's Solitaire. As in, solitary. As in, ONE PERSON GAME. You can't have a networked version of solitaire. If you're networked, you're not playing alone any more, then it's NOT SOLITAIRE!
If you attempt to patent networked solitaire, you deserve to die. If you approved the patent for networked solitaire, you deserve to die. If you're the lawyer taking the case of someone suing over a patent on networked solitaire, you deserve to die.
If you discovered a previously "undocumented" foreign folk song, the system usually allowed you to publish and put your dibs on it. The justification for copyrightability was that was that the new owner was making material accessible to people in the copyright system's realm of influence that hadn't previously been available there, and that documenting these old pieces was valuable work, and the people making these discoveries deserved to be able to make a buck out of it.
Anyhow, another twist on "prior art" ... I think there may be some rules whereby the US doesn't accept prior art as legitimate if it wasn't available within US borders, so if you did a tour of, say, Hungary finding previously undocumented folk songs, you could probably try copyrighting them in the US. But a whole bunch of European composers tapped into this scam about century ago, so there's probably not much left to nick.
Some Asian and S. American countries are increasingly getting a bit pissed off at the idea that US corporations are able to patent other countries' local public-domain solutions on the grounds that they can be regarded as "novel" inside the US, especially when those patents then get applied and enforced outside the US. If they legally have to respect US intellectual property rights thanks to things like the WTO agreements, but US businesses can register rights to their indigenous inventions and crops with no reference to local "prior art", then it feels to local activists as if the WTO et.al. are part of a conspiracy to **** them over i n ways that allow them no legal recourse.
This has complicated attempts to preserve and document biodiversity. You get seed-banks and universities sending researchers abroad to try to preserve records of local crop strains, supposedly in the interests of wider humankind, and the locals cooperate and share seed. And then when the researchers get the material back home, anything that seems to be potentially commercial gets patented by a corporation affiliated with the organisation, that supplies funding in exchange for a slice of the intellectual property rights on anything that turns up that has potential commercial applications.
Some of these countries have started to regard visiting Western academic researchers as essentially patent scouts working for US corporations.
It's getting especially fraught with plant strains. Many economically-important strains in the West are legally protected, and the people who developed particular strains are considered to have a monopoly on those strains, and on any new strains that are developed from them. So where does a commercial organisation find new strains to use in order to to develop new breeds, that aren't already owned by their competitors? They go outside the US and Europe, and collect samples of what's being grown there, and then they register the new offspring strains as theirs. Some other countries aren't too pleased to find that an increasing proportion of the genetic content of their indigenous food crops is being registered and/or patented by foreign corporations.
Eric Baird