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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.
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.
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.