Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
You are correct, this isn't just 'choose your own adventure movies'.
But it doesn't actually seem deserving of a patent anyway.
someone presumably can cite an extant choose-your-own-adventure movie where (just from looking at the first claim) the storyline is controlled by audience voting (basic), where some votes are automatically discarded "based on voter characteristics", and votes are weighted by a factor "based on voter characteristics, the weighting factor being based on at least ticket pricing" (yeah -- pay twice as much, get twice (or 10x, or 0.5x) as much say in the adventure!)
I give you: Larry the Lobster.
someone presumably can cite an extant choose-your-own-adventure movie
It's a 'motion picture' under the law, so it's a 'movie', even though broadcast on TV. Check.
the storyline is controlled by audience voting (basic)
Check.
where some votes are automatically discarded "based on voter characteristics"
People outside the US can't vote because they can't call 1-900 numbers. Check. (I'm not sure you can patent the ability to not count a vote, anyway.)
the weighting factor being based on at least ticket pricing" (yeah -- pay twice as much, get twice (or 10x, or 0.5x)
You get as much vote as you pay for, although you don't have a 'ticket' per se. Indeed, you can select how much you pay in real time, instead of having to do it in advance under IBM's method.
And that's just one example, the earliest. There's examples using pre-recorded video if that's somehow relevant, and other examples using free voting.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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
Milla Jovavich and Ali Larter, saving the world through passionate lesbian sex.
At least it will in my theatre.