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Unity patents ECS

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Re: Unity patents ECS

#111

Post by sombremesa »

btilly wrote: post #86
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…

Not a patent lawyer here. But I'm unfortunate enough to have several patents to my name, owned by past employers. My impression of everyone that I have ever heard from, or dealt with, involved with patents is that you all are so firmly in regulatory capture that your heads are captured up your collective asses, and the tech industry is being hampered by the resulting legal quagmires. In a sane world, the entire descr…

> In a sane world, the entire description that you gave falls squarely under "generic computers doing generic computer things".

That archetype stuff is so out of the norm that it took me a long time to grok how to work with it in Unity. It's most certainly not "generic computers doing generic computer things" and I've never seen it elsewhere, so I'd guess it would be quite defensible in court especially now that they have a patent.

Not sure what you're on about, but if it's a valid concern I'd pick a better example than this specific piece of tech (granted that one tiny snippet from the patent might not portray what the tech is or how it's unique).

Edit: seems like there is some confusion here about ECS and how archetypes are implemented in DOTS. ECS and archetypes are not synonymous, so I’m not sure what to tell you when you claim they are.

But I’m also not sure how downvoting me is helping here. I guess community consensus is that archetypes and ECS are the same thing, in which case Unity will have an uphill battle ahead.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#112

Post by jacques_chester »

nextaccountic wrote: post #30
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…

It's aggravating that parents are purposefully written in a language that makes it harder to read. What I could gather from it is that this is just an implementation of archetype-based ECS. Which just means that entities with the same set of components (that is, the same "archetype") are allocated together. But I don't know whether they are patenting archetypes in general or just a narrow usage. Now I have a question…

> It's aggravating that parents are purposefully written in a language that makes it harder to read.

Legalese is a discovered language. Various phrases are reused because their meaning has been found in previous court cases. Using novel language to express an idea with an existing, court-tested alternative is begging for trouble.

Lawyers are not very expensive compared to the consequences of trying to read it yourself. This would still be true even with a less-legal-ly legalease.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#113

Post by AlbertCory »

ska wrote: post #102
AlbertCory wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "a personal diary would work in principle, but you'd need to somehow prove that you wrote your thoughts down on the date and didn't forge it after the fact" Patent agent here, not patent lawyer . (that means I passed the patent bar exam and could write your patent, but could not sue anyone over it.) Wrong, wrong, wrong. Prior art has to be "published" (and there is a whole body of case law about what that means). M…

This is correct, although published is pretty broad it doesn't include everything under the sun. The real problem is that the patent examiners are not in general required to look at the whole breadth of what is published, just what is in the patent databases. As a result there can be clear prior art, but unless it gets fed in during the review process, the practical way to resolve that is likely to end up in court, a…

Interesting side note about non-patent prior art (by the way, the examiners do, most of the time, look for it):

I was told that a proposal to require the examiners to use Google was rejected by the union: if you're going to require us to do more work, then you have to pay us more.

This was back in 2012 or so. I have no idea if now they have to use Google, but they only get about a day and a half on each patent (again, this is old data).

Re: Unity patents ECS

#114

Post by AlbertCory »

ska wrote: post #102
AlbertCory wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "a personal diary would work in principle, but you'd need to somehow prove that you wrote your thoughts down on the date and didn't forge it after the fact" Patent agent here, not patent lawyer . (that means I passed the patent bar exam and could write your patent, but could not sue anyone over it.) Wrong, wrong, wrong. Prior art has to be "published" (and there is a whole body of case law about what that means). M…

This is correct, although published is pretty broad it doesn't include everything under the sun. The real problem is that the patent examiners are not in general required to look at the whole breadth of what is published, just what is in the patent databases. As a result there can be clear prior art, but unless it gets fed in during the review process, the practical way to resolve that is likely to end up in court, a…

One more point about this: the date on the publication isn't necessary the effective date. If it's a journal that says "May 1999" that doesn't mean the date is May 1. It would be the date that it became available to persons in the art.

Getting a librarian to say "yes, we cataloged it and made it available on May 5" would be pretty strong. Or a Wayback Machine archive from May 2.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#115

Post by deorder »

shock-value wrote: post #75
deorder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Without commenting on whether this patent should be granted or not, I really don't think it is about ECS in general. The patent has to do with an automated system for organizing component data into arrays and chunks. The key word being "automated". You give it definitions for component data, start creating entities with combinations of those components, and it does all the rest (at runtime). There might very well be…

Then doesn't a patent have to more precisely describe the "scheduler" mechanism or can they leave that out? If so. How can I know that I am not infringing the patent? My entity component system which is > 4 years old already does automatic scheduling with batches (what Unity calls chunks) to optimize the memory layout.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#116

Post by puddingforears »

sombremesa wrote: post #111
btilly wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a patent lawyer here. But I'm unfortunate enough to have several patents to my name, owned by past employers. My impression of everyone that I have ever heard from, or dealt with, involved with patents is that you all are so firmly in regulatory capture that your heads are captured up your collective asses, and the tech industry is being hampered by the resulting legal quagmires. In a sane world, the entire descr…

> In a sane world, the entire description that you gave falls squarely under "generic computers doing generic computer things". That archetype stuff is so out of the norm that it took me a long time to grok how to work with it in Unity. It's most certainly not "generic computers doing generic computer things" and I've never seen it elsewhere, so I'd guess it would be quite defensible in court especially now that they…

ECS is bog standard in a lot of smaller game engines. It’s not new, I first worked with it ~2010 while hacking some Flash stuff together, and I use it frequently when I hack together games in other engines. I’m really baffled by how Unity would be able to patent this.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#117

Post by euske »

nextaccountic wrote: post #30
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…

It's aggravating that parents are purposefully written in a language that makes it harder to read. What I could gather from it is that this is just an implementation of archetype-based ECS. Which just means that entities with the same set of components (that is, the same "archetype") are allocated together. But I don't know whether they are patenting archetypes in general or just a narrow usage. Now I have a question…

Now I expect someone to develop an AI-based translation system to convert legalese into layperson's expressions. It could be easier than translating two natural languages.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#118

Post by skydhash »

puddingforears wrote: post #116
sombremesa wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a sane world, the entire description that you gave falls squarely under "generic computers doing generic computer things". That archetype stuff is so out of the norm that it took me a long time to grok how to work with it in Unity. It's most certainly not "generic computers doing generic computer things" and I've never seen it elsewhere, so I'd guess it would be quite defensible in court especially now that they…

ECS is bog standard in a lot of smaller game engines. It’s not new, I first worked with it ~2010 while hacking some Flash stuff together, and I use it frequently when I hack together games in other engines. I’m really baffled by how Unity would be able to patent this.

I think it’s one of the standard architecture for games. You can do ECS or hierarchical objects any times you need to build a lot of similar objects.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#119

Post by [deleted] »

puddingforears wrote: post #116
sombremesa wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a sane world, the entire description that you gave falls squarely under "generic computers doing generic computer things". That archetype stuff is so out of the norm that it took me a long time to grok how to work with it in Unity. It's most certainly not "generic computers doing generic computer things" and I've never seen it elsewhere, so I'd guess it would be quite defensible in court especially now that they…

ECS is bog standard in a lot of smaller game engines. It’s not new, I first worked with it ~2010 while hacking some Flash stuff together, and I use it frequently when I hack together games in other engines. I’m really baffled by how Unity would be able to patent this.

[deleted]

Re: Unity patents ECS

#120

Post by jlokier »

shock-value wrote: post #70
coldcode wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically describing using a slab allocator to arrange the entities. How is this new art?

I don't know the details of slab allocators. Though if you are describing an allocator that does not have knowledge of what the memory is being used for (e.g. the difference between asking the allocator for memory for a position component defined as three floats and also a color component also coincidentally defined as three floats, versus asking the allocator for two sets of three floats without regard to their inte…

Some slab allocators are type aware, because some of them reset "freed" items into a type-specific initialised state ready for re-use
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