Patent Stupidity

Monday March 10, 2008 

From this post on the excellent Culture of Ownership blog, which in this case pulls its info from Ars about how patents are now being granted on certain elements of play in video games.

The example that they give is that Sega was recently granted a patent on the idea of "driving a car around a city with an arrow pointing towards the next destination".  Excuse me?  I’m pretty sure that it’d be easy to show prior art on this one, which would invalidate the patent.

And with very broad language being used for the patent application, it’ll be pretty easy for a patent holder to claim violation on something that’s only vaguely related to the issued patent.  How stupid could it get?  Think of a patent issued for the gameplay of a first-person-shooter.  Or if EA were issued patents on the gameplay of the NHL or NFL franchises.   From that point on, it’d be impossible for anyone to come out with a competing, potentially better game.

Uh, wait.  Don’t give the NFL any ideas.

I’m not even a gamer anymore, and I think this is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.  And if you think that it’ll only happen once, I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the near future you hear of a patent being issued to a new gaming company for something that’s been around in gaming for five or ten years.  Count on it.

And then the same type of patent will be applied to a method of doing something in another type of application.  Imagine, for example if Adobe were granted a patent for the method of creating a PDF by printing it to a specialized print driver.  Where would that leave any of the many third party PDF generating applications, which pretty much all do it the same way?  S.O.L., that’s where.

Hopefully this isn’t an idea that’s going to get a lot bigger. 

Filed Under Miscellaneous

Comments

2 Responses to “Patent Stupidity”

  1. james on April 17th, 2008 10:22 pm

    I saw http://rodtempleton.net/patent-stupidity/ and wanted to mention a useful site: http://www.FreePatentsOnline.com

    It provides free patent searching, free PDF downloading, allows annoting documents and sharing them, and free alerts for new documents.

    If you have a spot, a link to let your users know abou the site would be great.

  2. Expensive Cars on May 26th, 2008 11:52 pm

    Patent is a waste of time and it is keeping companies from making products faster and better. Too many damn laws to follow.

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