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?"

Comments

Why have that in colleges at all?

[Alex Belits]

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.?

Re:Why have that in colleges at all?

[Alex Belits]

Let me clarify -- why is this allowed? Colleges have shitloads of government funding and regulation behind them, why are they allowed to engage in business that is clearly at odds with their primary purpose? And if sports are OK then why not, say, strip clubs?

Re:Why have that in colleges at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not. There are some schools where the teams (on paper at least) make money for the school - the very biggest football/basketball teams. Or so it is claimed. I work at a university where one team recently got a big donation and by the conditions of the donation it all had to go to the athletics program (unlike, say, an NSF grant where a big chunk of change is taken in 'overhead'). The donation ended up costing the school a whole pile of money. For instance, traffic to games increased (a lot) and this required more parking, overtime for school security, and so on. And this is only one way that the donation has cost the school money.

I am also involved in the budgeting process and can tell you that there is a bunch of Hollywood accounting going on. Lots of costs for the athletics programs are funded through other budget items. Again, as a for-instance, a dorm has to be opened for the fall in the middle of the summer to support the football team and support people for the dorm have to be brought in, food service has to go from closed or minimal staffing/hours up to almost full time, food needs to be purchased - and these things are absorbed as part of university overhead and not charged as part of the athletic budget.

On the plus side, there are a bunch of non-athletic students who get a boost from this - they get paid to take tests for team members, and to write papers for them. So it ain't all bad.

Re:Why have that in colleges at all?

[DesScorp]

Let me clarify -- why is this allowed? Colleges have shitloads of government funding and regulation behind them, why are they allowed to engage in business that is clearly at odds with their primary purpose? And if sports are OK then why not, say, strip clubs?

Because college sports are not in and of themselves out of place at universities. All colleges from their beginnings emphasized mental, spiritual, and physical development. It's just that the spiritual has been all but driven from campus (except for a few devout schools, not even Catholic colleges are very Catholic these days), and the physical has been overemphasized because of money and a host of other reasons. "Short Bus" students are not only admitted on sports teams because they can score touchdowns, either. Have you looked at incoming freshmen classes lately? In any one, there's going to be a large group of *fill in "underrepresented* minority here* students that are admitted with lower GPA's and test scores because of 'diversity' goals. There are indeed dum dum's on the football field, but they're also in remedial freshmen classes as well, and most don't wear a sports jersey these days.

I'm a huge college football fan, but heavens yes, I recognize the commercial aspect is outrageous. Alabama's coach, Nick Saban, makes $4 million dollars a year to coach the football team, a record salary. The average BCS salary is now between $1 and $2 million per head coach. But the ugly truth of it is that filling the seats at football stadiums and basketball arenas also attract more non-athlete applicants, raise donor revenue levels, and sell lots of licensed merchandise which the schools rake in tons of money with. There's absolutely no doubt that having a successful sports program benefits the school greatly overall. But is it a devil's bargain? Yes, I think maybe it is. Should we go back to the same admission standards for athletes as baseline freshmen? Of course we should. But we should also eliminate "diversity" admissions too. Either you make the grade and you're ready for college, or bye, see us after two years of junior college. You can score touchdowns but have a low high school GPA? Juco's have football teams too. See you in two years.

We both know that'll never happen, though, for reasons of both money and politics. I'm actually against a playoff specifically because it further professionalizes the game. We've now moved up to an NCAA 12 game regular football season precisely because colleges wanted the revenue from that extra game. They cloak it in "the kids want to play", but we know that reason is secondary. I've always thought the NCAA tournament was farcical in regards to "amateur" status as well. Really, after a long, grueling basketball season, with up to two games played per week... during the semester... now you want a 64 team playoff? Just when are these kids supposed to go to class?

I'd like to see NCAA football go back to a 10 game regular season, no championship games, and limit the number of bowls to 15 or 16. But we know that'll never happen. Young men with spotty academics will continue to be admitted along with young men with spotty academics that have no athletic talent at all as long as they're filling the right admissions quota. Just the way it is.

Also in the news

[Chrisq]

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.

Submarine patent

[demiurg]

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.

Re:Submarine patent

[Dachannien]

No. A submarine patent is a patent issued on an application that was filed, or claims continuity to an effective filing date, before 8 June 1995, which means it gets a patent term of 17 years from the date of issue. The submarine strategy is then to keep the application pending (a relatively inexpensive proposition, given the potential profit) until an infringing product pops up in the marketplace, and then get the claims allowable, pay the issue fee, and sue.

Submarine patents were largely remedied by switching to a patent term of 20 years from the filing date (though there are still a very few applications still pending that have an effective filing date that gives them the old patent term). Now, if you keep your application pending for 20 years (plus patent term adjustments, a topic too complex to cover here), then when it issues, the term will already be expired.

As for the abstract not matching the invention, it's not really that great a loss, although the examiner should have objected to it. Patent searches are rarely done by flipping through abstracts. More often, they're done by classification along with keywords to search through the entire text of the patent. In this case, it's hard to tell why that abstract is attached to that application. It was probably a paperwork error, either on the part of the attorney getting their pages mixed up or at the USPTO mailroom. It's moot, though, since that application went abandoned.