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Can you believe this shit? Sega sueing level-5 over a control scheme.
Siveria
Member UncommonPosts: 1,419
Ok this is not strickly mmorpg related but still, watch this youtube video, and all I can say is "Can you believe this shit?"
Bascally Sega is trying to sue Level-5 studio's because they made a control scheme for a game where you move the char with the stylus. Their first version of this game that used that system of movement was in 2008, 1 year before sega made some patent for it, and now they are trying to sue level-5 over their more recent game titles. Its just a prime example of the Big bully kicking around the little guy.
Warning: The video has quite a bit of swearing with alot of Fbombs being dropped but the guy who made the video does have some very valid points.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Either way, you can't lose! Try it out sometime!
Comments
I do not agree with you.
I dont know all the details but Patents are the cronerstone of the tech world. If lvl 5 had this techand didnt patent it, they had to know someone else would. Patents are VERY easy to apply for. Furthermore, Patents are challengable in court. If lvl 5 didnt challenge this patent, but continued to use the tech, then that is theft. It just is.
Actually you can not patent something that is already made or public knowhow. If I hold a public speech about a tech I can not patent it anymore. Also you can not patent something that is a logical evolution of something. That it most likely why lvl 5 did not patent it. Using the pen to control something was a logical evolution in my opinion, but this is something that should be however decided in a patent court, but still if lvl 5 made it first they get the patent.
I can believe you really believe it suppose to work that way. That a company could just simply steal tech this way from an other company and then claim level 5 is stealing. How can you steal something you invented without actually selling it? I might not know a lot about patent, but I surly hope that patent law does not work like that anywhere...
also patents are not very easy to apply for. It actually a pretty lenghty process.
Patents are one of the most stupid bullshit mankind ever could create.
Imagine, Mankind managed to implement a rule that slows down our overall evolution.
Patents are like Satan and we should get rid of them as soon as we can.
Same with the supporters of such a mankind despising crap.
If we dont stop patents and their supporters, we gonna have to pay a big bill over that.
Learn what a corporation is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y
Then go and imagine, where this leads to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_patents_in_the_United_States
.. or to put the focus on games and their players ..
https://www.eff.org/patent-busting
Ban Patents and their supporters !
http://thewordiz.wordpress.com/
I blame apple for all this patent crap..
No a pattent can take a long time to be approved, it is NOT a hard process. And your example is so absurd on every level that it does not even apply.
1st off if YOU hold a speech about something YOU cannot pattened it. But that doesnt preclude others. Because you talk about something does NOT mean it is now public domain. And why does this even apply to this case? The Tech was not public domain.
2nd off, The "logical evolution" is VERY hard to prove in technology. The general rule of thumb is apply for a pattend on EVERYTHING and see what goes through. That is how business works. Lvl 5 didnt do this.
3rd Level 5 did not challenge the patent after it was granted or applied for. They could have very easily. They chose not to, but continued to use the technology. That is illegal. I dont see how they didnt "make money" off it if it is in games they sell.
4th if lvl 5 made it 1st and they dont apply for the patent, then NO they do not get the patent, as you suggest. As stated in #3 if they have proof they had it previously they can challenge the patent and win pretty easily. It happens all the time.
5th Nowhere does it say lvl 5 invented it. If you use the "evolution idea" then it is very possible that this tech is an evolution of something sega came up with , not lvl 5. Perhaps that is why sega was granted the patent and why lvl 5 didnt challenge. We dont know.
6th this is a very detailed case, and we dont know the details. But blindly saying "just another case of big company crushing little" is NONSENSE guesswork propoganda.
Lastly, this case is very vague at the moment because Sega has refused to comment on exactly HOW the patents were violated. That is crucial info that we cannot make judgements without.
I thank god that I work in the EU. The patent laws here (or the judges) are far more sane than in the US.
I do not have a problem with patents per se but rather with the way they are being misused by certain companies for control of market shares or other (smaller) companies. Its never about the tech itself.
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Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I'll assume if someone steals your tech and patents it, they don't exactly tell you about it.
So if someone can challenge the patent, he needs to monitor EVERY SINGLE patent claim or what, and then they can go, oooh, that's the shiney I invented. Or what?
As for patents in general..well, a lot of them are ridiculous, specially some of the more famous ones from the big corporations, like trying to patent a font/letter/color stuff like that. On the other hand, patents in which someone put a lot of money in, should be worth something, but again, in reasonable measures. Like that company that sued the farmer coz their GSO corn got on his field (it's a natural process called polination buy hey...) and mixed with his...and they won (gotta love those judges that fail to see how plants reproduce)...merka fk yeah!!!
Anyway, the patent system is getting abused now imo, didn't USA extend how long can a patent last, forgot which companies benefited most from those and were lobbying for it.
Patent wars have been the way to make money for years now. All tech is derived to a certain extent from previous tech so you can claim that anything infringed one of your patents. The law is not a set of hard and fast rules, it depends on who can put forward the best argument so that the rules can be interpreted the way you want them to be.
With members of the board of directors on tech firms frequently moving to companies they were in competition with, it is hardly a surprise that tech companies keep managing to poach each others ideas.
Maximum amount of money with the minimum amount of work. That's a characteristic of 'Americanism'. Patent wars, litigation, and a whole host of other examples come with that.
I recall an executive for a big IT company somewhere on the net saying how they base a lot of their efforts on litigation, positioning themselves to profit from litigation, etc, and that they make more money from litigation than anything they sell.
I think patents at its core is kind of a good idea (you know, protecting the inventor from bully corporations) but it seems like all I read about in technology news these days is patent trolling because of extremely vague patents.
Fuck you Sega.
<childish, provocative and highly speculative banner about your favorite game goes here>
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
If level 5 indeed had a game out using the tech prior to Sega getting the patent then all they need to do is challenge the patent that Sega has. If they indeed had it first then it should be pretty easy to prove. Shouldn't be a problem unless they did steal the tech, and rushed a game out before Sega got the patent finalized. Either way it's fairly simple case to resolve, and most certainly not a case of big guy bullying the little guy around.
The problem that patents are intended to address is this:
Suppose that you're trying to develop some new product, and it costs a ton of money to invent the product. But you press on anyway and come up with some great new product. The day you bring the product to market, a competitor buys several, takes them home, and takes some of them apart to figure out how they work. Then he makes a knock-off product that is just as good and brings it to market a few weeks later to compete against your product.
If that is predictably going to happen, then there's no way to recover your costs to develop the product in the first place. Thus, you won't do it, and neither your great new product nor any knock-offs of it ever come to market.
What a patent system does is to say that whoever puts in the cost of developing the product can be the only one allowed to sell it at all for a period of years. This gives him a chance to make some profit and cover the costs of developing the product. After a while, the patent expires, and anyone who wants to can create knock-off products. Thus, society gets products that wouldn't otherwise exist, albeit at perhaps inflated prices for a while while the patent blocks competition.
The clearest example where this is needed is in medicine. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a new drug to market, as clinical trials to show that it both works and is safe for use on humans are expensive. But once someone has shown that a particular drug is safe and effective, actually producing the drug is usually very cheap.
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Where the patent system goes awry is if you start allowing people to patent things that didn't take a ton of money to develop. If it costs just as much to develop a knock-off product as it did to create the first one, then patents don't serve any productive purpose, but only stifle competition and drive up prices for consumers.
That's usually the case with computer software, for example. Software should still be protected by copyright, so that someone can't take your exact software and sell it as his own without your permission. But competitors should be able to produce software that does something similar to what yours does.
You can't patent something that is "obvious". But juries rarely have the technical expertise to tell if something was obvious or not. Judges and patent officials often don't, either, though some of them are much more knowledgeable than most of the general public. The proper question is not what is obvious to the general public, but rather, what is obvious to people who have the appropriate background. To take something that I'm familiar with, how to compute the homology groups of a sphere is obvious to an awful lot of mathematicians, but 99%+ of the general public would have no clue.
Where it gets messy with computers is that pure software isn't patentable, but pure hardware is, and you can't use one without the other. A lot of attempts at basically patenting software (which is invalid) are written up as using a hardware device to do such and such.
If you invented the first device that was able to use a stylus as input, then that absolutely should be patentable. But you should only be able to sue other companies that create devices that use a stylus as input the way yours did. Suing software makers is not kosher.
Ultimately, we're going to need either a law to pass congress or a supreme court decision that clears this up, or else the problem of patent trolls is only going to get worse. The problem is that neither most politicians nor most supreme court justices really have the necessary expertise. You can't just write up a great bill and tell politicians that they should pass it because it's really great; special interest groups all across the political spectrum do that all the time, and politicians will (rightly) smell a rat.
Above, I said that some judges are more knowledgeable, but that doesn't apply at the Supreme Court level. The problem isn't who got appointed to the Supreme Court; rather, it's that at lower court levels, some justices can specialize in various areas. If a patent case comes up in, say, the fourth federal district court, the judges probably try to assign it to a judge who has dealt with a lot of patent cases. But Supreme Court justices can't specialize like that; they're the final court of appeal for everything.
Look up the term "prior art" and its relation to patent cases and you will know why you are wrong and he is right.
Nope sorry.
Again we dont know the details sega MIGHT be full of it and just sueing for the hell of it. BUT, the reason Prior art doesnt apply is because the patent HASNT BEEN CHALLENGED by lvl 5. They couold EASILY do so if, in fact, they had prior use of the technology under the Prior Art distinction. This is exactly what I said above without getting too specific.
BUT, part of the allegations explain perhaps why they have NOT challenged the suit.
The technology that Sega is sueing over was, by LVL 5's own admittance, 1st used in 2008 and the Patent was GRANTED in 2009. However, Sega APPLIED FOR the patent prior to the use by lvl 5 in 2008. So Part of sega's allegation is that the tech was taken DURING the patent was under review/pending. I have NO idea if this is true, because I do not know the detauls but using someone else's technology while a patent is pending is STILL against the law, if the patent is granted.
FYI it is actually 2 patent violations that Sega is suing over, I am unsure of the 2nd 1 because they didnt list what patents specifically. But it was granted in 2011. So unless this patent was under review for a LONG time, I dont know how Sega intends to prove this 1 was violated. I would need details. and Sega has not been very forthcomming with them.
I think all of this is not important - because like everything else, you know the Chinese are just going to copy it and sell it for $10 anyways lol :P
China - making patent useless since the 1990s.
The patent system is just as sane and reliable, same mathematical and scientific process. The language and interpretration of the laws and the fact that there's political division (inconsistent standards of perspective/authority) without acknowledging it is what screws up the process here.