71–80 of 135 posts
tl;dr: They ruined some guy's life and well-being to make an example out of him, even though he was not the primary actor.
If anyone has worked with an IP attorney before then they know that filing patents is a stength-in-numbers approach. You don't file patents because you think you're a genius, you file patents to defend yourself and ensure an end state of mutually assured destruction. It looks like Nintendo threw everything against the wall to see what sticks, which is what a good IP attorney would recommend. It's unlikely these would…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wish patents were a little more accessible. I read and write these for a living and I have my doubts about how useful these are, in general, to members of the public. One great use case for LLMs is the translation of patents into short, easily-readable summaries.
Is that a component of the patent system? It would be nice if there was (maybe there is) a "reasonable reproduction test" that required a patent's acceptance to be conditioned on someone being able to achieve the claim reasonably by reading it. Since the system exists for the benefit of humanity, I assume that is baked into the process?
I'm talking more about the practical act of sitting down and reading a patent. They are long, boring, and filled with legalese. A patent may be 50 pages long, but the interesting part may fill no more than a few paragraphs and be described using nouns and verbs you've never heard before. It's completely possible to read a patent, look at the pictures, and still have no idea what the thing actually is.
It's essentially legal abstraction -- inventors and patent attorneys don't want to be pinned down to a particular interpretation, implementation, or embodiment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most games that use detailed physics include optimizations like this.
I think the point is that the approach far predates games with anything like a physics system. That part of the patent seems to describe what happens when a character stands on a moving platform like an elevator. This stuff predates Super Mario Bros.
My understanding of the patent is that two objects that are normally subject to physics (the player and a platform), when the player stands on an object the player's physics are disabled and the player's position is just copied from the object.
But, like, there's no way this hasn't been done before.
We seem to always focus on the cost of the patent system, never the benefit. One day we will all be dead (or much older) and all of these features and patents will be freely available, described in significant detail to be reproducible, and the world will be a slightly more amazing place than it is now. If you look at all the expiring patents, many filed 20 years ago, you will find there are some neat things document…
I salute your intention to find the silver lining but my experience reading patents is that they are hard to read. I believe this is because their job is not to convey information but rather to fulfill a legal requirement. I also believe that less restriction of these "inventions" would lead to a greater proliferation of truly useful explanations. No doubt there are exceptions but this has been my experience.
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If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the examiners, who are familiar with the state of the art in the field, will reject them. Maybe the applicant will amend the claims to claim something narrower, or maybe not. If the examiner and patent office screw up and allow a claim that shouldn’t have been allowed, then the claim can be challenged later and revoked. Yes, that costs money and is inefficient sometimes.
Your original comment that monocasa responded to read only: > If the claims are non-novel or obvious, then the examiners, who are familiar with the state of the art in the field, will reject them. Which displays a stunning level of naivety and lack of familiarity with our patent system. Patents are regularly granted for extremely trivial (edit: and obvious) mechanisms.
We seem to always focus on the cost of the patent system, never the benefit. One day we will all be dead (or much older) and all of these features and patents will be freely available, described in significant detail to be reproducible, and the world will be a slightly more amazing place than it is now. If you look at all the expiring patents, many filed 20 years ago, you will find there are some neat things document…
What benefit? Most "inventions" hit the world @ large as soon as products incorporating them are released. Same world @ large gets the details after someone pokes around in those products & figures out how they work. That is practically always before patents expire. Truly smart innovations will survive over time. Obvious "inventions" are often trivial enough to be "invented" independently again & again. Patents mostl…
We seem to always focus on the cost of the patent system, never the benefit. One day we will all be dead (or much older) and all of these features and patents will be freely available, described in significant detail to be reproducible, and the world will be a slightly more amazing place than it is now. If you look at all the expiring patents, many filed 20 years ago, you will find there are some neat things document…
No thank you. That's not a unique benefit of the patent system, that's a minor ancillary benefit that has already been replicated elsewhere. The patent office doesn't have a patent on historical records of so-called inventions. And the patent process is not optimized to produce documents that actually help other inventors or future historians. In fact, to the contrary, as it exists within a particular narrow legal IP…
First, you misstate the purpose of disclosure. It isn't to become a record of historical inventions, it's to encourage inventors to disclose their innovations, as inventors otherwise would not disclose their inventions. Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.
Second, patents don't use convoluted language to hide an obvious process. That's (a) merely facial and a waste of time, (b) contrary to the actual legal goal of patents which is to encompass as much in your patent as possible, while still maintaining its ability to grant. Patentees must actually disclose their invention, in a way that's cognizable to someone skilled in the art, or they simply do not have any benefit from the patent at all.
If anyone has worked with an IP attorney before then they know that filing patents is a stength-in-numbers approach. You don't file patents because you think you're a genius, you file patents to defend yourself and ensure an end state of mutually assured destruction. It looks like Nintendo threw everything against the wall to see what sticks, which is what a good IP attorney would recommend. It's unlikely these would…
They do have a reputation of suing everyone who "infringes their copyrights". I would assume they would do the same over patents. Hell, there's even one case where they tried to sue themselves.