Has anyone cracked the “patently absurd” joke yet?

Posted on March 9, 2006 by Scott Jennings| 13 Comments

Because, as Ubiq points out, Microsoft’s attempt to get a patent for something that was in Rocket Arena TEN YEARS AGO is just wacky.

Wacky, by the way, also being a good way to describe the current state of patent law in the US. I wonder if the guy who threatened to sue every MMO for violating his wack-filled “I play games over the Internet” patent is still around.

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  • Gwaendar

    Prior art: had that in a MUD designed in the mid 90ies already. Geez, wonder how long it will take until someone patents breathing.

  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless_

    Hell I played a SW MUD that had arena view in it. Patent law is retarded.

  • Tony H.

    Isn’t there some kind of small non-for-profit orginization who’s job is to bust patents like this? I think they are more purely software based so it doesn’t matter if it’s game related or not but, this seems to be squarely in their arena. (Ha ha, I made a funny.)

    The US patent system (Heck, sounds like the world patent system) has not caught up to the times. And seems to be also being abused to patent the smallest thing just to grab a profit. Often dumb obvious things that just don’t make sence that they got patented except that the people who give out these patents have no idea about the world in which these patents will have the greatest effect. (i.e. Computers and the internet)

  • Nicademus

    Patent law isn’t so much the problem as the fact that we send Africa more money in Telecom aid every year (under a GOP congress) than we spend on the US Patent Office. Those people are so friggin under staffed, under paid, and over worked that I’m amazed they haven’t let a patent for fire or ice slip through.

    Small government is great until it starts breaking society.

  • http://www.eqclerics.org Boanerges

    Well consider the case of NTP and Reasearch in Motion(RIM) who makes a little doodad called Blackberry…

    NTP copyrighted a device to send email wirelessly. RIM, years later, actually builds the thing. NTP goes “You owe us money! Here’s our patent on this vague idea” and RIM goes “Huh?” Yes, NTP owns the patent but they don’t build anything with it. They’ve had the thing since 1990. The patent office is in the process of throwing these patents out but a federal judge wouldn’t wait for that process to finish (2 of 5 have been removed) so RIM had to cough up $615m or face a shutdown forced by NTP for a product they don’t even build. Earlier judgments had even given NTP a percentage of RIM’s income.

    Gotta love patent companies who produce nothing but patents.

  • http://www.wwiionline.com Dana V. Baldwin

    We got hit by one of these absurd patents earlier this year. Some guy had recieved a patent for moving the camera arouns a 3d model of an airplane represented on screen. Seriously. We are too little to fight it so we had to disable it (Note to self: Maybe Manifesto should work on that too). I think Atari finally paid him off some money.

    I wish I’d have thought about the EFF patent fighters earlier.

  • http://blog.psychochild.org/ Psychochild

    There’s also another online game patent threatening companies: 6,042,477.

    I’ve done some expert work researching prior art for patent cases before. In my opinion, patent law is the most absurd intellectual property issue (with the perpetual copyright terms enacted by Congress following soon after).

    The problem is that patents are a good thing in some circumstances. Allowing someone to invent an object and then profit from it is a great thing. Of course, if the independent inventor files for a patent too early, then most companies will prefer to wait out the patent for a few years instead of having to work with someone. But, the beauty of the system is that eventually everyone gets to enjoy the fruits of that inventor’s efforts once the patent expires.

    The biggest problems with patents are threefold:

    1) Patents which do not have any examples to back them up. A great example is the NTP case Boanerges mentions above. They patented an concept without any implementation. They waited until someone did the hard work of implementation and because successful, then sprang on them with lawyers. This is bad because it makes developers paranoid. You simply cannot keep up with patents like this, given that there were 181,302 patents granted in 2004 in the U.S. alone.

    2) Overstaffed patent examiners. It’s pretty much common practice to file a patent like this: File the initial application, but overreach horribly. (“Claim 25 says they have a patent on the sun!”) The overworked examiner finds the dumb claim and calls them on it. The company fixes the patent to remove the claim they figured they had no chance to get. The patent examiner figures that they’ve edited it to remove the obnoxiously stupid parts, so it’s okay to approve. Company gets an absurd patent minus the obnoxiously stupid parts. (Bonus points for the company if the examiner is so overworked that he ignores something obnoxiously stupid.) The minimum cost for a patent defense is about $200,000, and that assumes everything goes well and you can prove the patent invalid right out. Average cost for a patent defense is about $1 million.

    3) Allowing patents on things like software and business processes. Besides the argument that software is like a mathematical formula, the very nature of computers means that any idea patented will likely be patented for the lifetime of the technique. Anything software related in the mid to late 80′s usually isn’t considered very valuable, in general. It just doesn’t make sense to grant such long lifetimes to software patents.

    If these two things could be fixed, I think the patent system would be much better off. Until then, you’ll have the large companies patenting anything they can, and buying up other patents as they can in order to make money off of it. The real losers are the consumers that have to put up with inferior quality games because someone patented something absurd, but no one wants to spend the cool million to take them to task.

    Some insight from someone who’s seen the beast from the inside.

  • CmdrSlack

    >>Psychochild says, “Good, valid stuff…”

    The man gets a book deal and all of a sudden he’s a lawyer! ;)

    Really, software patents are stupid in the first place. Just protect it via copyright. It provides longer protection, is easier to manipulate and is even more bloated than patent law!

  • Motley Monkey

    As is obvious from the Blackberry case, if Microsoft didn’t patent the idea, somebody else could and then demand billions of dollars to not shut down xbox live.

    Until MS does something evil with the patent, we don’t know that it’s not just self defense.

    If I owned a tech business, I’d patent everything I could for self-protection. The way the law works now, you’d be pretty stupid not to.

  • Aceris

    Given what happened with Eolas, you can’t blame Microsoft for patenting anything they are actually planning to use. They don’t have a record of aggressive patent litigation, so it’s a bit harsh to jump to the Microsoft -> evil conclusion.

  • http://www.psychochild.org/ Psychochild

    The man gets a book deal and all of a sudden he\’e2\’80\’99s a lawyer!

    Yeah, but I still have to get other losers to write the law chapters. ;)

    Anyway, about Microsoft using the patents defensively: that is the ideal situation. However, large companies aren’t often known for their benevolence. This type of “defensive patents” also makes it prohibitively expensive for the little guys to play. I could have filed one patent, if I had chosen not to get paid at all last year. I kinda like that whole “eating” thing.

    So, this isn’t exactly an argument against patent law reform.

    Have fun,

  • http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    Aceris, they have stated a desire to be agressive, have hired people with a history of that and have started with the FAT patent…

    And if you reform IP law, for frick sake make it possible to clearly define what fans can and cannot do. Mod and fanfic makers will REALLY thank you.

  • http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    Actually, I’d like to note that trademark law, at least in the UK (And I don’t believe the US’s is much different), is surprisingly reasonable.

    You pay a single fee for the mark (including any further correspdence), what you can and can’t have is pretty well defined, and so on.

    Shame other areas of IP law are not logical in the same way.