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?"

Comments

Next movie you go to, thank your projectionist.

[LostCluster]

The idea of a branch-menu based book may be old, but the idea of a branch-based movie theater experience is new. Sure, it's easy to join digital video files to run back to back, but to branch to a different film segment without there being a visible gap is quite the work of art. Notice the gaps between the previews/ads that are shown before you get to the ones that are already on the movie's film.

This is a lot more than a film strip you saw at school. This is 24 frames per second and you've got to get the right film for the "choice" up there in fractions of a second. This is a patent on IBM's way of making this work, you could easily come up with another way.

because

[phantomfive]

Whatever happened to fixing the patent system, rather than continuing these mistakes?"

What happens is that every time a big company gets hit with patent lawsuits, they learn from it, patent a lot of stuff, and turn around and start making money off the system (IBM, Apple, Sun, Microsoft.....Sun wasn't even the sue-happy type, and they still made a ton off patents). So they don't feel motivated to try and change things anymore. Why should they? Then you have guys like Amazon, and their one-click patent, who pay lip-service to patent reform, but in practice they defend their stupid patent every chance they get.

We're all adults here

[Geccoman]

Isn't the porn industry already doing this? I mean, I HEARD they are already doing this.