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Unity patents ECS

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Re: Unity patents ECS

#101

Post by jhgb »

shock-value wrote: post #36
jcranmer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My read (and from what I know of ECS) is that it's basically claiming a system which automatically organizes the memory layouts of instances of different types of "entities" (i.e. "type" meaning which "components" it includes) in an efficient manner. Here, an "entity" is just an object identifier (integer, or whatever). A "component" is a specific set of data relevant to some function (e.g. position component would h…

> it's basically claiming a system which automatically organizes the memory layouts of instances of different types of "entities" (i.e. "type" meaning which "components" it includes) in an efficient manner.

V8 was already automatically creating virtual classes for Javascript objects like thirteen years ago.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#102

Post by ska »

AlbertCory wrote: post #90
lamontcg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone online talked about archetypes earlier than June 12, 2018 that can be prior art. You don't need to have working code to take on a patent. If someone posted a medium article, or even some kind of proof of concept or cobbled together POC that'd be enough. (I think really any kind of proof that you had the idea before that date is good enough -- a personal diary would work in principle, but you'd need to some…

> "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, and likely to be expensive.

Of course often "clear prior art" isn't too. Hence the process to sort it out.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#103

Post by lamontcg »

AlbertCory wrote: post #90
lamontcg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone online talked about archetypes earlier than June 12, 2018 that can be prior art. You don't need to have working code to take on a patent. If someone posted a medium article, or even some kind of proof of concept or cobbled together POC that'd be enough. (I think really any kind of proof that you had the idea before that date is good enough -- a personal diary would work in principle, but you'd need to some…

> "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…

Ah okay didn't know that.

Still I think I've been deposed (I got grilled by an actual hostile patent lawyer) before over an old Usenet post I made in the late-90s (that was really more of a "showerthought" in the middle of an flamewar) that was being used to attack a patent.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#104

Post by oraknabo »

For people looking for how far back prior art goes, Looking Glass developed an ECS for the Dark Engine on the Thief games (& Irrational used for System Shock 2) in the late 90s.

The version Unity's been building with DOTS was, I believe, being headed by Mike Acton, who's been advocating for years for everyone in the industry to abandon OOP and switch to data-oriented systems. I wonder what he thinks about this.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#105

Post by oh_sigh »

Who are the examiners who are reading and granting patents like this? Are they experts in their field? IE, could they program a game in C? Do they keep up with state of the art techniques?

Re: Unity patents ECS

#106

Post by jeffparsons »

jhgb wrote: post #100
shock-value wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was wondering when this would come up. Everything people are inventing in the "ECS" space, including the very concept of "ECS" itself is just concepts from databases being adapted to storing small amounts of ephemeral data that needs to be manipulated very quickly in-memory rather than large amounts of data that need to be persisted reliably on disk.

The idea that there's anything patent-worthy in automatically storing like combinations of data with like combinations of data for efficiency is... patently absurd.

But that's where the patent system is, now, I suppose. It's now mostly just a tool to help incumbents raise the barrier to entry so they can fend new entrants off with lawyers rather than merit.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#107

Post by not2b »

ilaksh wrote: post #84
shock-value wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 automa…

What exactly is their system for determining optimal layout? It must be disclosed in detail. They can't just claim that any approach like that is theirs.

Unfortunately your second sentence is not correct; patents do this overclaiming game all the time.

(not a lawyer, co-inventor on three patents so I've been through this, unfortunately as I didn't want to participate in that system, consult a lawyer before doing anything rash).

The claim matters, not their detailed description. The most harmful patents work that way: describe in detail a specific implementation, but write the claims to cover every alternative implementation you can think of.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#108

Post by not2b »

cosmotic wrote: post #29
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…

As a patent lawyer, can you explain what that claim means? Why does it seem intentionally confusing?

There is a strange rule that each claim in a patent must be one sentence. So they construct these massive run-on sentences.

Re: Unity patents ECS

#109

Post by nightpool »

lamontcg wrote: post #103
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…

Ah okay didn't know that. Still I think I've been deposed (I got grilled by an actual hostile patent lawyer) before over an old Usenet post I made in the late-90s (that was really more of a "showerthought" in the middle of an flamewar) that was being used to attack a patent.

Yes, the rules changed in 2011, as part of the America Invents Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_inv...
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