OnLive Awarded Patent For Cloud-Based Gaming

donniebaseball23 writes "Cloud gaming provider OnLive has secured a patent for an 'apparatus and method for wireless video gaming.' The patent gives substantial leverage for OnLive over competing brands in the cloud-based gaming market. 'Hundreds of people have worked incredibly hard for more than eight years to bring OnLive technology from the lab to the mass market, not just overcoming technical and business challenges, but overcoming immense skepticism,' said OnLive CEO Steve Perlman. 'It is gratifying to not only see people throughout the world enjoying OnLive technology in the wake of so many doubters, but also receive recognition for such a key invention.'"

Comments

This seems to be a very strange patent

[Chrisq]

It is very general in some ways but contains odd specifics:

comprising: a unit that includes a processor operable to execute at least one high twitch-action video game, video game video being produced therefrom; a compression unit for compressing the video game video with a latency of less than approximately 80 ms, but greater than about 5 ms;

So the patent wouldn't cover latencies outside this range?

The set-top box of claim 10 wherein the wireless transceiver operates in the 5 GHz band.

Why this band only?

Ignoring these oddities I can't see much that isn't obvious - a box connecting by Wifi to a router connected to the internet for playing games.

Re:This seems to be a very strange patent

[udippel]

a compression unit for compressing the video game video with a latency of less than approximately 80 ms, but greater than about 5 ms;

which is the only part in here, I agree, that is not really off the shelf, so to say. I mean, it has probably to make with the latencies between the players.
But what does it make a patent? Where are the technicalities in here??

So the patent wouldn't cover latencies outside this range?

No. But I guess, that about all 'high twitch-action' would fall into that range. And I secretly assume that's what the attorney put on the table as argument: chances are these numbers are not 'anticipated' in the list of cited documents.

Why this band only?

Not 'only'. It is a dependent claim, so the patent is valid in any frequency range, and specifically so in the range of 5 GHz.

The best thing altogether is the list of documents cited against this application: I stopped counting when I reached 100. Actually, having been patent examiner, I never ever before saw such a long list. How can the examiner seriously find the relevant elements comprised of aspects and features from more than 100 documents??
Just look at the claims, there are only 25; and many in principle repeatedly covering the wireless and wired connection. Plus on RAID array.
Maybe the examiner and his assistant try to compete for the 'most ridiculous number of Cited References in any US patent ever'?

Good nite USPTO, you best are leveled and restarted from scratch!

Re:This seems to be a very strange patent

[udippel]

We are on Slashdot, so everyone is expected to be a dick. You're welcome.
Maybe in the times of my former career this was considered overdone? Actually, I really never saw those numbers in my times.

And though I am well aware that the applicant has to cite anything that he is aware of as prior art, I only can consider this hilarious. It rather shows a bad (if not lazy) behaviour on the side of applicant/attorney/examiner: To my best understanding, as well as common sense, it is the task not to blindly plug whatever has similar keywords, but intelligently identify the most pertinent documents. Which usually cannot be more than a handful.
No wonder the USPTO grants so much crap these days, when seemingly quantity beats quality hands down.
The independent claims are pretty clear, containing a handful of features. So a good examiner will be able to pinpoint not more than around 3 most pertinent documents, and base the argumentation on those.
If your 'recently issued patents' have more than 200 references, no wonder the quality of the USPTO has gone south as south can be. That's the exact opposite of a sign of a quality examination and grant procedure.

And I am a former on my own resignation. After 6 years the facts were simply too overwhelming: the patent system in these days is anything but helping the individual inventor or the SME. It helps just one section: the multinational conglomerates. Nobody else, neither society nor consumers.

Re:This seems to be a very strange patent

[udippel]

"[...]the Office is aware of and evaluates the teachings of all information material to patentability. Each individual associated with the filing and prosecution of a patent application has a duty of candor and good faith in dealing with the Office, which includes a duty to disclose to the Office all information known to that individual to be material to patentability as defined in this section."

This is the general blurb. Now we get more specific ['as defined in this section']:
"The Office encourages applicants to carefully examine:
[...]
(2) The closest information over which individuals associated with the filing or prosecution of a patent application believe any pending claim patentably defines[...]"

'closest' is a rather unambiguous term. It is not dumping the content of the patent office's database, or at least of all documents in the same patent class, unfiltered to the office. And so should the office do, if not lazy: evaluate

Meh

[nicholas22]

They can get all the patents they like, I think it's not worth the hype it's getting. Congrats to the teams and all, I'm sure there were a lot of technologically challenging problems that had to be solved (e.g. compression) but in essence it was always going to be laggy gameplay on the cheap.

Progress!

[igreaterthanu]

I welcome any and all patents on bad ideas. It means that only this company can now use said bad ideas.

This cloud gaming thing has all the bad things about DRM, plus additional lag. I want games to run on my machine where I control them. I want games to work when I am in the bus, and mobile internet is far too slow for gaming.

Re:Progress!

[igreaterthanu]

The fact is that this is the ultimate form of DRM, never giving the code to the user.

Once they realize that this will prevent piracy, this could very well become an exclusive method of distributing games, then customers who actually pay for games, like me, will either have to go with it or miss out.

X forwarding

[KiloByte]

Oh so many years ago, I played Quake 1 over remote X on four IRIX boxes connecting to a single beefy Linux server. It required a pretty small window to be playable, but beside that, it worked surprisingly well. The server was two network hops away, in the same building, next to some big-ass clusters.

Except for using a wired network rather than wifi -- which is immaterial to the issue at hand -- tell me, how exactly did that differ from this cherished patent?

Re:X forwarding

[udippel]

in my mind the implementation of OnLive is doing something a lot more complicated than X forwarding (the idea, of course, is the same).

It's working over a contended public network with a large number of hops with varying latencies, doing low latency compression on HD resolutions at reasonably low bandwidth.

As I understand it, wifi adds more unreliability (packet loss and latency) to the network path

Yes, and? Though I am not totally against patents, but then these complicated methods ought to be filed, not the resulting off-the-shelf product.

Square Enix has prior art.

[lxs]

Cloud based gaming was integral to Final Fantasy 7.

Re:Overcome?

[h4rr4r]

$2000? You can get graphics cards that handle any current game for a tenth of that.