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Unity patents ECS

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Re: Unity patents ECS

#41

Post by mabbo »

Setting aside whether or not this patent is silly or abstract or obvious or anything else, I have one important question: what does Unity plan to do with this?

Most big tech companies have a constant stream of patent applications, many of which are granted. But they rarely sue over 99% of them. Sure, Amazon had one-click for however many years and they cared about it. But the other tens of thousands of patents Amazon owns (a couple of which have my name on them as 'inventor') are never going to see a court room.

Why do they patent everything? So that patent trolls can't patent it first and then sue them for patent violations. It's a defensive patent.

Is ECS going to be Unity's "This is ours, no one else can use it without paying us" lawsuit-generating patent? I doubt it. They know they'd lose in court eventually, and along the way the entire industry would stop doing business with them. It would be a complete lose-lose move.

On the other hand, now that Unity owns this patent, no patent troll can go and patent ECS then start suing small-studio Unity customers, like parasites leaching off the success of Unity.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#42

Post by zoobab »

kortex wrote: post #23
hackthefender wrote: post #18

Patent lawyer here. There is a lot of dubious stuff already in this thread, so be careful with legal opinions from people on the internet. Some relevant claim language is below. Of course a lot of this stuff has been known for a while, but you have to have everything together--or an evidenced argument that combining things in this way would have been obvious--before you can conclude anything about the validity of the…

> And on unpatentable subject matter (i.e., being an abstract idea), there is a pretty good argument that this improves the functionality of the computer, not just uses a computer to do something known That's not really what is getting folks riled up with respect to patentability. The techniques mentioned (as interpreted by some) are considered not at all novel, being widely known in the prior art. That's my take. I…

Invalid under Alice.

We don't care about the "prior art" filter, because the patentability filter already failed.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#43

Post by pclmulqdq »

jcranmer wrote: post #22
dubcanada wrote: post #2

How does such an abstract idea get approval? Like Figure 4B. It's a diagram that basically says, if something happens and we need a new entity we create one... Figure 4A is literally talking about adding to an array. Figure 1 is just a diagram of a computer? The abstract is just garbage collection...

What the patent actually covers is governed by the claims at the very end of the patent, and most of the rest of the document is generally irrelevant, per my very limited understanding of how patents work. That said, I've reread claim 1 a couple of times and I have no clue what it is actually claiming.

The other disclosure establishes prior art for other people and sets you up for more patents in the future with the same prior art date (continuations).

The claims are the legally enforceable part.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#44

Post by shock-value »

jjoonathan wrote: post #25
hackthefender wrote: post #18

Patent lawyer here. There is a lot of dubious stuff already in this thread, so be careful with legal opinions from people on the internet. Some relevant claim language is below. Of course a lot of this stuff has been known for a while, but you have to have everything together--or an evidenced argument that combining things in this way would have been obvious--before you can conclude anything about the validity of the…

Wait just one second... they managed to actually get a completely generic description of ECS into the claims? EDIT: yes, yes they did. What you see above is in fact clam 1, in it's entirety. This is worse than usual. Usually "X patents (common thing)" headlines actually mean "X patents (common thing with weird twist)," which is a great deal less severe. This really looks like Unity got an actual patent on the actual…

Not really. To me the novelty in the first claim is that they have a system which automatically determines an optimal memory layout, even in the face of new combinations of components within a newly created entity. A typical hand-crafted ECS system wouldn't likely infringe -- it's more likely that the memory layout was defined in advance.

I guess this will be a major roadblock to Unreal Engine offering such an automated ECS system, which is a real shame. There are certain types of games which do need ECS to make viable use of computing resources (simulations, etc). You don't see many of those on Unreal now and I guess you won't for the foreseeable future if this patent holds.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#45

Post by zoobab »

kensai wrote: post #32

I wonder if this patent will be recognized or enforceable in Europe.

EPO has destroyed the law with "as such" or "technical effect", and they are lobbying hard to get the UPC in place, so that software patents are fully "valid" accross Europe.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#46

Post by runevault »

deorder wrote: post #24

I don't see anything new even when considering the entire context. I have worked on similar data-oriented entity component systems for over 10 years. Unity was actually very late to the game and Sony had to push them to give it more priority. Edit: Some examples, including the use of chunks, or what I call batches: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15414523 https://old.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/6nxfzp/going...

Not sure about Archetype specifically, but discussions on twitter about this have pointed out talks from GDC going back to at least 2002 when it comes to ECS.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#47

Post by [deleted] »

hackthefender wrote: post #18

Patent lawyer here. There is a lot of dubious stuff already in this thread, so be careful with legal opinions from people on the internet. Some relevant claim language is below. Of course a lot of this stuff has been known for a while, but you have to have everything together--or an evidenced argument that combining things in this way would have been obvious--before you can conclude anything about the validity of the…

[deleted]

Re: Unity patents ECS

#48

Post by deorder »

runevault wrote: post #46
deorder wrote: post #24

I don't see anything new even when considering the entire context. I have worked on similar data-oriented entity component systems for over 10 years. Unity was actually very late to the game and Sony had to push them to give it more priority. Edit: Some examples, including the use of chunks, or what I call batches: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15414523 https://old.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/6nxfzp/going...

Not sure about Archetype specifically, but discussions on twitter about this have pointed out talks from GDC going back to at least 2002 when it comes to ECS.

Yes, but their claim is specifically about (quoting my other comment):

> It appears to describe a data-oriented component entity system in which all data types within a component are assigned to chunks (batches) in such a way that they can be optimally grouped with data from components of other entities for optimal memory access.

This is not new either. I and others have done this for years. The term "archetype" is something they made up to describe something that has been done many time before.

Edit: It appears that the term "archetype" was introduced somewhere in the last few years. Not sure then if it is specifically coming from Unity.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#49

Post by kortex »

zoobab wrote: post #42
kortex wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And on unpatentable subject matter (i.e., being an abstract idea), there is a pretty good argument that this improves the functionality of the computer, not just uses a computer to do something known That's not really what is getting folks riled up with respect to patentability. The techniques mentioned (as interpreted by some) are considered not at all novel, being widely known in the prior art. That's my take. I…

Invalid under Alice. We don't care about the "prior art" filter, because the patentability filter already failed.

Where does the patentability filter fail? By "clearing the bar of novelty beyond prior art" I am referring to both novelty and non-obviousness.

You seem to be implying, by referencing what I can only assume is the Alice Corp case, is that the patent is too abstract. I don't think that's the case. The patent describes a very specific technique for memory management and archetype based inheritance.

I think the technique would be patentable were it an inventive step above the prior art, but it's not novel enough, IMHO, IANAL, BBQ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...

Re: Unity patents ECS

#50

Post by letsInvalid »

jcranmer wrote: post #22
dubcanada wrote: post #2

How does such an abstract idea get approval? Like Figure 4B. It's a diagram that basically says, if something happens and we need a new entity we create one... Figure 4A is literally talking about adding to an array. Figure 1 is just a diagram of a computer? The abstract is just garbage collection...

What the patent actually covers is governed by the claims at the very end of the patent, and most of the rest of the document is generally irrelevant, per my very limited understanding of how patents work. That said, I've reread claim 1 a couple of times and I have no clue what it is actually claiming.

Unity is claiming they came up with this:

https://www.gamedev.net/tutorials/programming/general-and-ga...

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