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Unity patents ECS

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Re: Unity patents ECS

#91

Post by AlbertCory »

Patent agent here. At Google we investigated patents and their possible invalidity almost every day.

Claim language is obtuse because it's for lawyers, not laymen. An engineer can write the description, but only the lawyer can write the claims.

It's immensely complicated, but if Unity does someday assert this patent against someone else, then you all are helping the defendant when they have to defend themselves. At least, I hope the defendants find this discussion.

The defendant's standard tactic is usually to file for IPR, or PTAB reexamination of the patent, which is like a trial without a courtroom. The cost figure I recall is $500,000; maybe it's different now.

If the IPR succeeds, then Unity is SOL. There was a Supreme Court case recently where some plaintiffs tried to get the whole IPR system thrown out. They failed, as far as I know.

Lastly, the whole back-and-forth with the PTO is in the public record, if you know how to find it (and if you think reading claims is difficult, wait 'til you try reading a prosecution history!)

Re: Unity patents ECS

#92

Post by munificent »

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…

> they managed to actually get a completely generic description of ECS into the claims?

From looking at the claims, it seems they are patenting archetype-based based ECS. In other words, not just vanilla "array of components" but "array of sets of components".

Re: Unity patents ECS

#93

Post by Buttons840 »

mabbo wrote: post #41

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…

Indie game developers do seem like a group who wouldn't take kindly to being told they can't do what they want with their own computer.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#94

Post by IdoRA »

kortex wrote: post #58
greensoap wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you have a widget and it matches claim 1-8 but does not match claim 9, it does not match. This is not correct. If you infringe claim 1 then you infringe claim 1. Whether or not you also infringe claim 9 doesn't matter. Assuming Claim 9 is dependent on claim 1, claim 9 includes all the limitations of claim 1. So claim 1 is A+B+C.... Claim 9 is 1 + D = A+B+C+D. So if you infringe 9 because you have A+B+C+D then…

I may have explained it incorrectly, I'm a bit rusty. I did a lot of work in pharmaceutical route development, where some patent does "ABCD123" and we'd do "ABCD456". My point is more that, patents are usually laid out like: 1. A method for crystallization of a pharmaceutical in an organic solvent with some counterion. 2. (1), where the solvent is ethanol, or methanol 3. (1), where the counterion is Cl, SO4, or NO3 4…

Considering the doctrine of claim differentiation, your hypothetical could still be infringing Claim 1. You’d have to consider the spec, among other things, to persuasively argue one way or the other.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#95

Post by AlbertCory »

On software patents, something I've devoted a hell of a lot of time to:

The commenters who mentioned "regulatory capture" and patent trolls are 100% right. But it's much worse than you think: the professional societies (ACM, IEEE) and tech industry management are solidly not in your corner, either. They've invested too much money in the current system.

Let's imagine that GitHub or StackOverflow or some other large developer forum ran a poll: "Are you in favor of abolishing software patents?" What do you think the results would be?

Why don't they ask the question? Unfortunately, they don't want to hear the answer. It might move Congress to actually do something, which they always prefer not to do.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#97

Post by kristianp »

AlbertCory wrote: post #95

On software patents, something I've devoted a hell of a lot of time to: The commenters who mentioned "regulatory capture" and patent trolls are 100% right. But it's much worse than you think: the professional societies (ACM, IEEE) and tech industry management are solidly not in your corner, either. They've invested too much money in the current system. Let's imagine that GitHub or StackOverflow or some other large de…

Stackexchange has a patents sub-site aimed at finding prior art for software patents, so I wouldn't paint them with that brush.

https://patents.stackexchange.com/

Re: Unity patents ECS

#99

Post by AlbertCory »

kristianp wrote: post #97
AlbertCory wrote: post #95

On software patents, something I've devoted a hell of a lot of time to: The commenters who mentioned "regulatory capture" and patent trolls are 100% right. But it's much worse than you think: the professional societies (ACM, IEEE) and tech industry management are solidly not in your corner, either. They've invested too much money in the current system. Let's imagine that GitHub or StackOverflow or some other large de…

Stackexchange has a patents sub-site aimed at finding prior art for software patents, so I wouldn't paint them with that brush. https://patents.stackexchange.com/

And indeed, I have a quote from Joel in my paper [1].

However, the law is full of the phrase "practitioners in the art." A poll showing that a vast majority of practitioners of the art feel one way would have some effect. Whether it would be enough, or how long that would take, is an open question.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580

Re: Unity patents ECS

#100

Post by jhgb »

shock-value wrote: post #78
letsInvalid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, 2019 is out How about 2013: https://www.gamedev.net/tutorials/programming/general-and-ga... I use a heavily updated version of this for my own projects

It's not relevant. Unity is claiming an automated system for determining an optimal memory layout as entities with new combinations of components are generated (at runtime). Such a layout defined in advance would not infringe.

> Unity is claiming an automated system for determining an optimal memory layout as entities with new combinations of components are generated

So they've patented a database server, basically.

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