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Will Patents Make NCAA Football Playoffs Impossible?
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Cuban recently announced plans to create a college football playoff system, which many people (including President Obama) have been claiming has been needed for years. However, after doing so, Cuban received an odd email, claiming that he'd better watch out, because a college football playoff system is patented and anything he did would likely infringe. The patent wasn't named, but Techdirt believes it has found the patent in question, along with another pending patent application (which has some amusing errors in it — such as an abstract that says it's about a boat fender, rather than a sports playoff system). So is it really true that some random guy in Arizona is the only person who can legally set up such a college football playoff system?"
Why supposedly educational institutions keep teams of what is essentially professional entertainers and let this business overshadow education? At the extent of admitting "special" (as in "short bus") students and pretend to educate them, spending budget on things 99% of students can never use, hiring a coach who is paid more than any other person working for the school, etc.?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Reform of a field of sports for an entire nation is dependent on the whim of a random individual somewhere.
This coming to light could be a good thing, maybe something a lot of the general public actually give a shit about like sport will highlight how ludicrous the system is to a wider audience.
The patent is on "A method for conducting championship playoff", not on conducting championship playoffs. There's a difference. Do the same general thing in a way that isn't covered by the patent and you're safe. Honestly, I can't see any reaon you have to use the weighted result of polls.
There are already NCAA football playoffs. Just not the FCS division, formerly known as Division I.
As exemplified by the summary, there's a pervasive misunderstanding on Slashdot on how patents work. Just because someone is able to patent one method in the field of X does *not* exclude others from practicing in the field of X.
Don't get me wrong - method patents like this stink worse than the NY Giant's defense in the 4th quarter, but they are generally pretty easy to avoid by simply doing one step differently. Rival companies do this all the time with ligit process patents.
Isn't it lucky that the guy has got the patents system to enable him to innovate on how to organise playoffs
Bin Laden family has taken a patent out on the concept of the USA winning a war against and Islamic state. The US troops have been instructed not to fight too hard in case they infringe this patent.
What the hell is a playoff system?
Is it a way of taking lots of team & play them against each other & narrowing them & finally 2 of them play in a Final match to decide the winner?
If so, don't tournaments around the world in other sports already do this?
For eg.
In the last cricket world cup help in 2007
- 16 teams played
- 4 Groups each with 4 teams. Each team played the other team in the group once.
- 2 top teams chosen from each group. So 8 teams left out of 16.
- The 8 teams now played round robin against each other team in the group of 8 except the team which was from their group. They had already played this team in group stage - so their result against this team was carried forward & added to the result of their other 6 matches.
- Four top teams emerged from the 8.
- Team 1 played Team 4 in one semi final & Team 2 played Team 3 in the other.
- The Winner of the two semi-finals played in the final.
Is this a playoff system? Did I infringe any patent by posting this?
no, AC's only get any modding at all if they're saying something really interesting. you are not.
you get a big [citation needed] instead.
it could be said the main reason europe has not had another world war is as much to do with FIFA as it is to do with the UN.
The patent application mentioned in TFA went abandoned 17 August 2009. Importantly, all of the claims were rejected under 35 USC 101, i.e., they were determined not to be patentable subject matter. The examiner in that case also noted that the prevailing judicial wisdom on 101 had changed over the past few years, which was why they were able to cite an issued patent as prior art.
It's also notable that, in a general sense, the claims of the issued patent mentioned in TFA are not structurally dissimilar from the rejected claims in the abandoned application. That doesn't necessarily mean that a court would hold the claims of the issued patent to be invalid, but it does provide some insight into what might happen if a lawsuit came out of this.
This is not an error, this is called a "submarine patent" were one intentionally writes an abstract which different from the claims. As a typical patent search returns hundreds of patents, reading the whole patent is not feasible, so people either don't bother with patent search at all or read just the abstracts. Having abstract different from the claims makes the patent "invisible", i.e. impossible to find - hence the "submarine" term.
No, the GP is absolutely right.
If you've never seen one of these patent lawsuits, they start by going through each claim (that the petitioner claims infringement), and identifies how the infringing technology contains each element of the claim. The easiest way to have such a suit dismissed is to have at least one element different (or missing) in the supposedly-infringing technology. In the case of method claims, as the GP says, just do one step differently.
As an example, the issued patent (6,053,823) has only one independent claim, which has the elements (steps) of:
--------
- adding the rank of each participating team from a first poll to the rank of each team in a second poll to obtain an initial overall rank; [element 1]
- assigning a final rank for each team, with the lowest sum of the initial overall rank constituting the highest rank, and the highest sum from the initial overall rank constituting the lowest rank; [element 2]
- conducting a championship tournament with at least the three teams having the highest final rank, comprising the steps of:
- conducting at least a first round of events to determine the two teams to play in a championship game; and
- conducting a championship game with the two teams determined from the previous round of events, to determine a champion. [element 3]
--------
So to start out we see that this method requires adding the rank of each team from a couple of polls. Don't use polls? No infringement. Don't add the rankings from the two polls to establish the initial overall rank? No infringement.
Secondly, a final rank for each team must be calculated, with the highest and lowest ranks determined as described. Don't have a final rank for each team? No infringement. Determine highest and lowest differently? No infringement.
Finally, a championship tournament must be held with at least the three teams having the highest final rank, which must also have the two steps of (1) a first round of "events" to determine the two teams to play in the championship game, and (2) playing the championship game. Have only two teams in the tournament? No infringement. Don't have a first round of events? No infringement.
As I hope you can see, there are lots of ways (I've identified only a few) to have a playoff that avoids this patent. What the headline to the linked article should say is, "One Method of College Football Playoffs Patented."
>>Why is this [sports] allowed?
Because 20,000 people won't buy tickets to watch a meeting of the Princeton Math Club.
Because CBS isn't interested in buying the broadcast rights for the Dartmouth Glee Club's next season.
Because rich alumni don't donate millions to keep their alma mater's Medieval History curriculum competitive.
The so-called patent is a joke. If you read the blog post, a "method patent" .. "issued long ago" - hint for the clueless, these things expire, so this is just someone having random fun at your expense.
yeah yeah, justify, rationalize, explain. spend THAT much effort to portray it as workable, despite we are seeing another problem every 1-2 days, on major scale.
yeah.
Read radical news here
Yes.
At first blush, I had the same answer as you. Actually, this falls into the "anybody can take anybody to court over anything" category. Playoff systems existed before those patents, before the patent holders were born too. This could all be moot if the NCAA continues to drag its feet for another 20 years, lets the patent expire, IIF it applies, and use the idea at that time.
Home of The Suki Series
Because it relates to patent trolling.
This puts patent trolling in the limelight.
Next time you discuss something like patent trolling with a jock (as if, I know) you will have something relevant to him to refer to.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I just find it fascinating how posters on this story are blasting the patent system and the entirety of the United States itself based on a single, solitary email from some unknown guy. I don't know how any reasonable person would assume with such 100% certainty that this single patent proves anything about any fact other than "once upon a time some guy managed to obtain a bad patent."
Because 20,000 people won't buy tickets to watch a meeting of the Princeton Math Club.
So?
Because CBS isn't interested in buying the broadcast rights for the Dartmouth Glee Club's next season.
So?
Because rich alumni don't donate millions to keep their alma mater's Medieval History curriculum competitive.
Now we hit on the real problem: rich alumni who never really appreciated the value of an education. Of course, that implies that at one time, the school accepted people who were not really interested in receiving an education, likely an ongoing problem. Really, the core problem is simple: higher education is not really about "education." With a tiny handful of exceptions, becoming an educated person is more of an optional side effect of going to college, rather than the primary aim.
So of course those rich alumni would like to be able to say, "Yeah, that's my school!" while they are watching college football with all their friends, and could not care less about whether or not their degree actually represents anything.
Palm trees and 8
Ever wondered why your country is getting it's ass kicked in every sphere known to mankind except the number of lawyers per head of population?
While I bitch about the state of the Union as much as anyone, to say the United States is getting it's "ass kicked in every sphere known to mankind" is not only demonstrably untrue, it's not even a very good troll. The only reason I even responded was because some morons actually modded you insightful.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Some quick googling found me the following article from 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/04/commentary/column_sportsbiz/sportsbiz/. One pertinent line is "USC's profit as a percentage of revenue is just 43 percent, below the average of 48 percent for all the reporting bowl teams [55], even when you include the 11 schools which lost money on their football programs. The top 20 football programs in terms of revenue have profit margins of about 60 percent, on average." And even these stats leave out secondary benefits, such as increased enrollment, donations, ...
I read the patent but I'm not a lawyer, and it seems easily avoided. He makes specific claims. All the claims 2-? seem to be defined in combination with claim #1. None of them seemed to have any novelty aside from combination with claim #1, so claim #1 is probably what really matters.
Claim #1 specifies two things: a way of combining polls, and a playoff of 3 or more teams. From my non-lawyerly standpoint, I'd say that he's proposing exactly what they're doing now for 2 teams and extending it to 3+. For the non-Americans in the audience, the NCAA has a system of combining multiple polls, choosing the top 2 teams, and letting them play for the championship. So he turns that 2 into 3+.
First problem is that indeed it seems obvious. This idea probably occurred to anyone with a pulse who watched college football over the last few decades. What's more, the NCAA has more lawyers than he does. So does Mark Cuban.
If 'death by lawyer' is not enough, tons of journalists have been clamoring for exactly what's patented - namely, form a playoff from the final rankings basically as described. Go find somebody who published an article prior to the patent describing the same basic thing.
Other than that, just avoid claim one and the whole thing seems to fall apart. One might use a method of combining polls to seed the teams as he describes. Absent that, I don't know what's left besides a single-elimination tournament as you mention, for which ample prior art exists going back, oh, thousands of years probably.
I don't think it should be hard to avoid stepping on this patent. Currently, the NCAA uses a committee to select the (at large) teams that play in the basketball tournament, which they've been doing for many decades.
So despite Mr. Patent Troll's assertions, there are probably a number of ways around this patent, in my non-professional opinion.
We already have championship playoffs for NCAA Div I (FCS), Div II, Div III and NAIA. They've been around for decades.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
it's not even a very good troll. The only reason I even responded was because some morons actually modded you insightful.
A troll who gets modded insightful is the best kind of troll.