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IBM Patents Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Movies
An anonymous reader writes "IBM, whose former patent boss is in charge of the USPTO these days, and which claims to support patent reform, has just been awarded a patent on choose-your-own-adventure style movies, despite plenty of prior art. Whatever happened to fixing the patent system, rather than continuing these mistakes?"
Ahem, Scourge of Worlds - A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure (2003) would like a word here.
http://www.amazon.com/Scourge-Worlds-Dungeons-Dragons-Adventure/dp/B00009KU8L
From the description: Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons and Dragons Adventure is not a film sequel to Dungeons and Dragons (2000), but the DVD equivalent of an interactive role-playing novel. There are over 900 short digitally animated sequences, leading every so often to a choice to be made with the remote control, resulting after about 90 minutes in one of four possible endings.
Sorry IBM, your prior art is sitting in a card board box in my basement.
I suggest that everyone view this talk regarding patents and open source software. It focuses on how open source developers can maneuver around patents, but also provides a lot of information regarding how patents can be better understood. After viewing this presentation, I've realized how moronic a lot of posts on Slashdot regarding patents truly are.
After watching the video and examining the patent it seems rather trivial to dance around it. It's a completely stupid thing to patent, but it isn't going to impede anyone who develops something similar.
I skimmed through the claims. I've seen and participated in public showings of technology that covers most of this. Some commenters mentioned the Dragon's Lair laserdisc arcade game, which I was never very good at. I've also seen interactive stories (both pre-recorded and realtime rendered) where the audience votes at various points in the story; sometimes it was computer vision based, and sometimes we had devices with voting buttons (including our own cell phones). Students in Carnegie Mellon's ETC have created a number of public demonstrations along these lines. But the important claims in this patent that I haven't seen before are:
- Your individual vote's weighting is based on your ticket price
- The total story arc that the audience voted for is saved for future viewing
- The audience votes on the total story arc, so that future audiences can pick the most popular arc
That's where to start looking for prior art. I don't remember whether prior art has to exist for all claims or just one claim in order to invalidate the patent, but Claim 1 describes the entire setup with all of these parts.
Actually this kind of branched movie was done as far back as 1985 in Czechoslovakia in a television series Rozpaky kuchare Svatopluka. When the series aired for the first time, the story would stop at certain points for then-live transmission where Josef Dvorak (the starring actor of the series) would ask the viewers to vote for one of two possible alternatives in the story. Both live audience in the studio and TV viewers could vote, the former with a voting box that was passed around, the latter by turning lights on and off. An engineer from central power control would then announce which alternative caused a bigger power drain (got more votes) and the story would continue with the alternative chosen by TV viewers. Reruns of the series today show the story chosen by viewers in 1985.
Futurama - S02E08 - Raging Bender. The crew go to a movie theatre and vote for what Calculon should do next. The result: Tedious Paperwork
Dragon's Lair, mid 1980s? It was a coin operated video game that basically played animated scenes from a laserdisc. Your inputs decides which way things forked at key points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair
This exact premise has been used in science fiction before, which should be enough to deny it a patent.
There's a concept called "non-enabling prior art".
Sure, science fiction stories have been written describing time travel, cold fusion, AI, teleportation, etc. Go build them - after all, you've got that "prior art". Wait, they don't fully describe everything sufficient to enable someone skilled in the art to build those things? Ah. Then they're "non-enabling" prior art, and are only "prior art" for the few bits they do enable - in other words, the broad concept. You couldn't patent: "A method for time travel comprising (a) traveling through time." because there would be prior art for that, but you could certainly patent a method that went beyond the mere musings of authors.
Exactly. The summary was clearly written as a troll of the patent system, and attempts to prevent a rational fact-based discussion by misinterpreting the patent and ignoring how the law works. In order to even start having a discussion of this patent on its merits, you have to read the claims:
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1. A method for selecting a logical branch in a storyline among a plurality of available storyline branches on a computing device, based on voters' votes, comprising:
obtaining and accumulating, the votes from the voters on a computing device for at least one of the plurality of available storyline branches, during the presentation of the storyline; selectively
excluding votes, using the computing device, based on voter characteristics from the accumulated votes for a specific storyline branch;
multiplying, using the computing device, at least one received vote by a weight factor based on voter characteristics, the weighting factor being based on at least ticket pricing;
calculating, using the computing device, a total for the accumulated and weighted votes; and
determining, using the computing device, a winning tally that corresponds to one of the plurality of available storyline branches;
selecting and presenting, using the computing device, at least one of the available storyline branches with the winning tally as a future storyline branch during the presentation of the storyline, and
generating, using the computing device, a media version matrix specifying a selected storyline having a particular set of logical branches selected by the voting for later use and retrieval, by recording each selected corresponding storyline branch of the plurality of available storyline branches on the computing device.
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Just remember, before you say, OMFG THAT'S OBVIOUS, you have to find references that teach all of those limitations, and if you have to use more than one reference, you have to have a rationale for combining those references.
Disney did this years and years ago. I remember a ride in Disneyworld that was a 3D theater ride. Toward the end, it would let you choose how to get home, whether it was through space, plane, etc. The theater would choose by pushing one of several buttons on the armrest and the winning sequence would play. It has been done.
the idea of a branch-based movie theater experience is new
For you, maybe. I'd like to add that I remember specifically going to a movie theater around a mall in Texas that did exactly that. That was in...oh, '95 or '96.
The basic premise was some private detective who went around solving mysteries. Every few minutes, he would turn to the audience and ask them what he should do next. The seats were equipped with a joystick with color-coded buttons---pushing a button would cast a vote in favor of a particular course of action. The theater staff explained that there was no limit on the number of votes that could be cast from a particular seat, so every time a decision came up, people would spam votes for whichever choice they preferred.
I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but my parents made us leave early because it was riddled with some rather suggestive humor. To be fair, my sister and I really were a bit young for it---I fully credit that movie with introducing me to the concept of S&M. But they practically had to drag me out of the theater.
I guess this might be the right place to ask---does anybody know the name of that movie? I'd really like to look it up.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Well, somebody has got to check this out and tell me what you think. http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=6&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=millstein.IN.&OS=IN/millstein&RS=IN/millstein About 4 years ago I came up with a site (socialsaga.com) that was a lot like choose your own adventure. So, being young and stupid, when somebody told me I should try and patent the idea, I tried. Bunch of time and some money later I get a final rejection from the USPTO. Then I see this shit and can't believe my eyes. The one thing that I thought was good about Patents (that it gives small guys the chance to hold on to an idea that a huge company can steal easily) is now dead in my eyes. That sounded a little overly dramatic, but man I put a lot of work into trying to get this patented.