Valve losses Steam controller patent lawsuit.

[jagdtigger]

30 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Actually it's not dumb, it's just. 

Patenting simple 0 creativity things like button placements is not just.......

[Peters]

 

Valve's motto - Let's do it!

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

Patenting simple 0 creativity things like button placements is not just.......

The patent system has massive problems.   Unfortunately ther are things with even more massive problems atm so it’s unlikely to be fixed soon.

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, Peters said:

 

Valve's motto - "We'll just keep to appeal anything those pesky courts lay in our way... "

Fixed? 

[Jito463]

On 2/4/2021 at 4:46 AM, porina said:

The problem is companies (and other holders) game the system as it exists. If they patented really new and unique stuff, is it unreasonable for them to not want others to easily copy it? So patents are a game in writing it in as broad a way as possible so you capture as much potential coverage as possible, but not so general it gets thrown out. Write it too tightly, someone can change something to get around it. As you can imagine, this is highly dependant on interpretation and if you disagree, you'll likely have a long and expensive legal process to go through.

 

I don't know the history of how patents came to exist, but the language they use makes no sense and I'm saying that having contributed (and thus named) on a patent in previous employment. All I can remember as part of the process were the endless meetings with legal to make sure what was in the patent was what the "invention" was, and the language was always a wall.

Patents should only exist for specific implementations, not for generic design choices.  There could be wiggle room for someone trying to just slightly alter the implementation to get around the patent, but they should never be handed out for such a vague description.

On 2/5/2021 at 12:31 PM, Kisai said:

There is no reason why a corporation should own patents, trademarks or copyrights. These should be assigned to a living human, and for the corporation to use such IP, they must employ every human creator/inventor in a position that allows for that IP to be used. If that creator dies, the IP should expire immediately except when the IP has not come to market, in which case the IP is assigned to survivors until the product comes to market. Especially in the case of trademarks.

At its core, what is a corporation but a group of people that have banded together?  For example, what if I get into business with two friends, and we decide to build a product together.  Which one of us holds the patent?  Whichever person files it holds all the power, but by joining it to a corporation that we're all part of, then we can share the power of holding the patent.  There are many legitimate reasons for corporations to hold a patent, trademark or copyright.

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, Jito463 said:

Patents should only exist for specific implementations, not for generic design choices.  There could be wiggle room for someone trying to just slightly alter the implementation to get around the patent, but they should never be handed out for such a vague description.

That would be copyright, not a patent if it's a specific implementation.

 

Patents, to an extent need to have a certain vagueness...but what I disagree with is how patents are granted to things that already exist (e.g. The genes for spider silk are patented).  Or just the general though that adding triggers to a controller is nothing new (e.g. Sony did it, but this patent just improved the utility of it...but at the same time, anyone who spends time designing ergonomics things could easily have come up with that design)

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, Jito463 said:

Patents should only exist for specific implementations, not for generic design choices.  There could be wiggle room for someone trying to just slightly alter the implementation to get around the patent, but they should never be handed out for such a vague description.

At its core, what is a corporation but a group of people that have banded together?  For example, what if I get into business with two friends, and we decide to build a product together.  Which one of us holds the patent?  Whichever person files it holds all the power, but by joining it to a corporation that we're all part of, then we can share the power of holding the patent.  There are many legitimate reasons for corporations to hold a patent, trademark or copyright.

Not exactly.  You don’t join in a corporation,  you join in a partnership.  (A type of business that almost doesn’t exist any more) You don’t join in a corporation, you create one.  The main purpose of a corporation was to create a blind.   Corporations limit liability.  LLC literally stand for “limited liability corporation”

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

That would be copyright, not a patent if it's a specific implementation.

 

Patents, to an extent need to have a certain vagueness...but what I disagree with is how patents are granted to things that already exist (e.g. The genes for spider silk are patented).  Or just the general though that adding triggers to a controller is nothing new (e.g. Sony did it, but this patent just improved the utility of it...but at the same time, anyone who spends time designing ergonomics things could easily have come up with that design)

One of my favorite patent end runs was what Chrysler did to Porsche’s 944 engine patent.  Porsche managed to turn th 928’ v8 into a four cylinder by cutting it in half and adding some big counterweights, which kind of randomlu did very nice things to the engine smoothness of 4 cylinders.  Chrysler skirted the patent by running the connection to the counterweights through the crank case which did the same thing and lowered costs at the same time.   The way patents are supposed to work.  It made the concept better.  Now a days though people don’t submit 1 patent.  They submit hundreds of almost identical patents. The Chrysler thing would never work today.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Jito463 said:

Patents should only exist for specific implementations, not for generic design choices.  There could be wiggle room for someone trying to just slightly alter the implementation to get around the patent, but they should never be handed out for such a vague description.

Again:

Patent - The blueprints

Copyright - The right to make copies of a thing that exists

Trademark - The right to exclusive use of shapes, letters, design language (eg logos) on a narrowly defined product class.

 

Patents should expire if no product (copyright) is produced within a reasonable amount of time that would to take the tooling/manufacturing to setup. No sitting on something for 20 years, no patent trolling where the patent troll produces nothing. The patent owner must be an individual (or collection of individuals who have agreed to RAND terms for licensing it.)

 

Copyrights should expire, either immediately when the copyright owner(s) die, or the prerequisite hardware needed to use/play it is withdrawn from sale. Eg, video games and software copyrights should expire when the drives or game consoles are no longer sold. The copyright doesn't expire on the entire thing (eg Super Mario Bros) only on that version (Super Mario Bros for NES), and should the original copyright holder republish it, that republish, remastered version is a new version and it's copyright does not have any bearing on the previous version. This also applies to "version numbers". For example. Every version of Photoshop before CC2020 should be public domain because Adobe has removed it from sale. Adobe has also terminated products (eg Flash became Animate) therefor the previous product under the previous name should be public domain.

 

Trademarks should expire if they are genericized (eg google/photoshop) in one context. Trademarks also should expire should there be opposition to it. For example, trademarks on single-words that are verbs in any language. If an individual registers a trademark, they are required to C&D any use of that trademark, anywhere in the world, even if the trademark is only registered in their home country as a proactive defense.  They can not sue for damages unless they have registered it in that country.

 

5 hours ago, Jito463 said:

At its core, what is a corporation but a group of people that have banded together?  For example, what if I get into business with two friends, and we decide to build a product together.  Which one of us holds the patent?  Whichever person files it holds all the power, but by joining it to a corporation that we're all part of, then we can share the power of holding the patent.  There are many legitimate reasons for corporations to hold a patent, trademark or copyright.

 

This is where the idea of a corporation has far exceeded it's usefulness. What we define as  corporation in the US, Canada, and Europe would be more like an Empire with it's own laws that apply to nobody outside it.

 

Unions, are collections of employees, but are in a sense, a corporation of labor.

Churches, are collections of faith "employees", but in a sense are a corporation of faith.

Yet, Publicly traded and Private corporations are not collections of employees, they are an entity controlled by one person (the majority shareholder), or a few people. Yet their actual employees, own no part of the company or it's IP.

 

This is why patents, copyrights, and trademarks need to be assigned to individuals, or small groups of individuals (eg two engineers, not one engineer and one lawyer) who actually did the work. That ensures that they can license and manufacture the product and it doesn't go extinct because a corporation no longer wants to produce it, or wants to sit on the IP (which happens to films, music, and video games) to strengthen the market position of something else they have the rights to.

 

When you see companies like Facebook and Google buying companies, and then nearly immediately shutting it down, that's the kind of thing you want to prevent, and that only happens when corporations can't own the IP, only the individuals.

 

[Rugg]

13 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The patent system has massive problems.   Unfortunately ther are things with even more massive problems atm so it’s unlikely to be fixed soon.

That's not why it won't be fixed, it will never be fixed. It wont be fixed because the only people who could possibly cause it to be fixed is megacorps with the money to lobby government. However, it's cheaper for those same megacorps to just pay off the BS licensing trolls rather than bribe their gov't workers.

[Fnige]

I wonder how it would work out if patents required the product to be made before they work

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Rugg said:

That's not why it won't be fixed, it will never be fixed. It wont be fixed because the only people who could possibly cause it to be fixed is megacorps with the money to lobby government. However, it's cheaper for those same megacorps to just pay off the BS licensing trolls rather than bribe their gov't workers.

It’s a reason.  Even if the mega corps suddenly changed their minds it would still be in the way.  There are was around the mega corps.  One of the big ones is they’re corporations.  Their leadership are old men who have maybe ten years before retirement. If you do something slow acting enough they don’t notice much less care.  They want to make their pile and leave.

[Kisai]

15 hours ago, SlimyPython said:

I wonder how it would work out if patents required the product to be made before they work

Really patents should

a) require a working prototype

b) require a tangible product

 

If it's intangible, no patent. It's software. It's copyright. Unless you want to post the entire source code in the patent application to a working example of it, you have no way to prove the thing in the patent application works, and since source code depends on explicit tool chains to be used (eg compilers and libraries) the patent office has no way of evaluating if source code works and does what it says it does (remember people can just make source code to fake the output they want.) A binary blob is proof of nothing. If you want exclusivity on something , prove it works and that it's a creation entirely dependent on the patent. Otherwise it's under copyright, and nobody is obligated to use your program incorporating the algorithm.

 

The thing about tangible patents, is that many patents are iterations of the previous thing. A 1-button controller (eg Atari), a 2 button controller (Famicom, sega SG-3000/master system), a 4-button controller (Sega Genesis, NES), a 7 button controller (Sega Genesis), 8 button controller (SNES, Playstation), 10 button controller (PS2),11 button controller (PS3/PS4, Xbox 360), 12 (Wii gamepad), 13 button controller (Stadia), etc. And such iterations of a product are not novel or unique, anyone could have added one more button. Adding a touch pad? Making the analog controls clickable? That's just iteration. Nothing novel has been added to gaming controllers since the Wiimote, in which case the wiimote added a camera and accelerometers so it could have several more analog axis by waving it around that are inertially independent (eg the wiimote can be flipped and rotated, not just swung around.) The PS3 controller/motion controller did this completely different, requiring two additional accessories to get the same input needed that one wiimote+nunchuck did. Microsoft doubled-down on the Kinect, and largely failed, because both Sony and Microsoft didn't include these features in the base hardware, so almost no software made use it.

 

Motion controls in ALL games? gimmick. Rhythm games and exercise games made good use of motion controls, everything else, it was too much of a gimmick and people would just not bother with it. Only relatively recently have people figured out exactly what motion controls are good for, and it's not games, it's for VR environments, it's for telepresence, it's for virtual actors. Instead of making it the "input device", you make it the avatar "puppet" strings.