Joystick Port Patented, Now the Lawsuit 222
Panaqqa writes "It appears that Fenner Investments, a Texas based patent troll, is at it again. This time, they are suing Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo for infringing a patent they hold on joystick ports. Perhaps they felt they needed a "Plan B" now that their lawsuit against Juniper Networks, Nokia, Cisco, Alcatel and Ericsson is not going so well."
Hopefully we see more of this (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior art? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Prior art? (Score:5, Interesting)
What we need, as part of patent reform, is the ability to call BS on a patent during these lawsuits, which puts the infringement claim on hold until the patent itself is reviewed and debated over. Start a seperate court case to review the patent, with both parties able to produce evidence and expert testimony about the technology in question. If the patent is ruled bogus, then it should be invalidated on the spot and the infringement suit dropped.
That would cull a lot of bogus patents and maybe discourage filing them in the first place.
=Smidge=
Re:Prior art? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, it would be nice if a patent could be voided on the grounds that it was deliberately worded to obscure similarity to prior art.
Its called "reexamination" (Score:5, Informative)
The U.S. Patent Office has such a procedure -- its called "reexamination." "Inter parties" reexamination allows two parties (the patentee and an accused infringer) to "reexamine" a patent before the USPTO in view of new prior art. If the USPTO agrees with the accused infringer, it can invalidate the patent. Lawsuits regarding patents in reexamination are commonly stayed (i.e. put on hold) until the reexamination terminates.
Reexams often result in dubious patents being invalidated. The reason you do not read about them more often on /. is that the purported prior art is often grossly exaggerated by the accused infringer (as in the RIM/NTP patent case), so there may not actually be sufficient grounds to invalidate the patent.
Re:Prior art? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Prior art? (Score:5, Informative)
This is an extremely rare thing and actually makes the requirement hard to fulfill. It actually limited the Graham Factor, "one of ordinary skill in the art," practically eliminating it. I do not think the CAFC truly thought this out before making a decision, because if you already the idea to combine the two technologies (and mention as much in your patent specification) then you would almost certainly have claimed it, which would make it a 35 USC 102 violation, something that is really easier to defend for a Patent Examiner.
I believe we are still waiting to see the end result of KSR v. Teleflex before SCOTUS. If SCOTUS rules with KSR and essentially says the CAFC over-stepped their bounds, then you could be looking at the mass invalidation of thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of patents. You mention the standard is hurting Microsoft and Sony, but it actually is helping another industry with as much if not more money. The pharamaceuticals and bio-tech companies love the standard as it is because it helps them get a lot of patents on new drugs passed. I believe if you review the documents from KSR v. Teleflex, you will find support for KSR's writ from a group that included Microsoft, while the big pharma's filed in opposition (supporting Teleflex).
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"The patent system is cumbersome, imperfect, costly, etc. but it is also the best system to stifle innovation by anyone not able to field a thousand lawyers to protect themselves from someone who patented an obvious technology after it had been in existence for 20 years due to an idiot in the patent office."
Re:Prior art? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the process developed by the patent court was that a granted patent was assumed to be valid until proved otherwise, therefore what would in fact happen is that if the evidence that you infringed was strong enough, regardless of possible invalidity of the patent, the court would enjoin you from distributing your product while the case was heard!!! This is why RIM settled with NTP, remember? Of course there was a case at the Supreme Court at that time challenging the patent court's ridiculous procedure, and SCOTUS slapped down the patent court just a couple of days after RIM paid off NTP. And now new cases will proceed rather more like you describe.
And as a post a few down from yours points out, there is currently a case before SCOTUS that may result in restoring sanity to the evaluation of prior art and non-obviousness...
Re:Prior art? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Prior art? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember trying to learn to program the PC joystick in assembly language around 1993, and it was a real pain in the ass to get it right. You had to constantly poll the joystick and put in all kinds of delay loops. Apparently, proper analog-to-digital converters were very expensive when the PC game port was designed, and so this crude circuit design was used instead. See the wikipedia article for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port#Circuits [wikipedia.org]
Bottom line: this patent ain't new technology. In fact, it's OBSOLETE technology. There are much better ways to get an analog measurement from a joystick, and there were even in 1998 when the patent was filed.
Capping the maximum damages awarded. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Capping the maximum damages awarded. (Score:4, Insightful)
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<pedant>when talking about money M usually means thousand, and MM million.</pendant>
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True for parts of the world, but not other parts.
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Most of the patents we see today are stupid, transmitting email wirelessly over a tcp connection...durr. They're granted because the examiners have -zero- clue what they're doing in most cases... and if you don't like the examiner you got, feel free to resubmit till you get one stupid enough to grant your inane bullshit.
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I'd like to see (Score:4, Insightful)
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Patent Troll list (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll [wikipedia.org]
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And.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Oh the injustice (Score:2, Funny)
Haven't poor Microsoft and Sony been vicimized enough?
How's a poor ruthless-megacorporation supposed to make a buck these days?
Prior Art anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Should be trivial to invalidate (Score:2, Interesting)
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This device seems to be for connecting an analog joystick to a digital input by converting the analog postion into a PWM digital signal. It's an analog joystick with the A/D and encoder built-in. Perhaps an incremental improvement, at best. I suppose it eliminates the need to have the A/D hardware on the console itself, so the connection can be all digital (and have fewer pins). You could even retrofit
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It's possible they come up with something unique that hadn't been done before. But if it was that unique, how did all three companies manage to have it standard by now? Especially since the big differences between this generation's controllers and last involve wireless (Wii's wired controllers are Gamecube controllers), so if the newest consoles infringe, the last have to infringe as well (since the ports ar
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I don't think the Analog position/PWM conversion is the real meat of the infringement claim -- you're correct, that's been in use long before 1998. The cleverness he
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Hey, remember when Universal Studios... (Score:5, Funny)
Good times, good times....
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Re:Hey, remember when Universal Studios... (Score:5, Informative)
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Glad we got that cleared up ...
Anyone read Patent-ese? (Score:2, Insightful)
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very creative (Score:5, Informative)
http://web.pdx.edu/~heiss/technotes/aiie/tn.aiie.
Whoopie.
Because Fenner's patent used a tristate buffer instead of an open collector NPN transitor they own this kind of joystick?
geesh.
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So to get definite prior art, you just need to find a soundcard with a standard 0x201 gameport address, with the game port hardware implemented in a CMOS ASIC. Which is really easy, considering the patent was filed for in 1998. Ev
It's been done before (Score:5, Interesting)
As near as I can tell from the text of the patent, this patent troll has patented the use of an Analog to Digital Convertor for converting the analog output of a joystick into a digital signal. I'm not 100% certain but it sounds like either an integrator type circuit or a PWM type circuit. The intriguing bit is the mentioned use of a VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip as a part of the design. This could mean utilizing any of the large fabric chips from the likes of Altera, TI, or Lord knows how many others are in the market nowadays. Heck, this could be interpreted to include the PIC chips in common use nowadays.
I'd have to look in my old college electronics book (Electronic Communications - vol 5 by Schrader) to see, but I think these types of ADC circuits were discussed even back then (circa 1985). If not, I know the Peavey DECA series of digital power amplifiers (circa 1988) utilized an integrator type ADC for doing converting the analog audio signal to a series of digital pulses (PWM) used for driving the MOSFET finals.
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I believe that's exactly what it does. That's not novel. What could be novel is that they seem to be putting the PWM signal on a button input to the console, giving a game with the ability to read the PWM as a joystick
This is the patent office's fault (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand that business need to protect themselves, and I'm a lot more forgiving of hardware patents (because that make sense) but reading the patent all I see that MIGHT be new is the power saving circuitry rather than a novel joystick connection.
They do need more examiners and the second patent applied for each year should cost twice as much as the first to file. (This would curb blanketing the system hoping that one of them sticks).
This is my theory and it's mine.
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Patented?
Prior art... Nintendo 64 (Score:5, Insightful)
Their patent applies to analog joysticks. It's a method of sending the information of a joystick's position as a digital pulse, therefore requiring less wiring for multiple analog sticks and buttons. The controller could send the information about the various states of the buttons and joysticks encoded as a digital stream.
Unfortunately for them, they applied for the patent in '98, long after the N64 was released. I don't know for sure, but since the N64 controller only has (IIRC) 3 wires in the cable, they must be using something like what this patent describes.
It's interesting that they applied for the patent two months after the release of the dual-shock controller for the PS1. IMO, someone saw the dual shock and patented the idea on how it would work.
Joy, Home-grown patent trolls (Score:2, Funny)
Fixing the system (Score:3, Interesting)
Company applies for patent, patent judge receives comments from university departments focused on that type of technology, judge reviews comments to verify if this is a revolutionary new idea worth granting a patent to or not.
I also liked the suggestion that the cost of patenting scale up the more patents one files within a given timeframe. This should keep a company from essentially conducting a "denial of patent review" attack by filing so many similar patents that the academics will simply give up participating in the system.
I would also like to see some sort of financial pentalty applied to corporations who attempt to patent existing work. In this case, if the court finds the patent should never have been granted, I would accompany the dismissal of their lawsuit with a hefty fine. Force companies to conduct solid research instead of just filing some paperwork and seeing what they can slip through the system.
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I agree that better examination is required, even perhaps by peer review. However, patents (in any nation at any time) have never been reserved for "revolutionary" inventions (novel and non-obvious is the U.S. standard). The reason for this is simple -- it is often impossible for ev
Re:Fixing the system (Score:4, Insightful)
The fundamental problem is that the potential cost of losing is so low that it is becoming commoditized, which is why we're starting to see patents being bought and sold in bulk.
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USB (Score:2, Interesting)
Standard joystick port, except with CMOS voltages? (Score:2)
Doesn't mean that they can't harrass and shake down a few companies. But it seems like an awfully weak claim.
Prior Art circa 1977 (Score:2, Informative)
Join the USPTO! (Score:2, Interesting)
That being said, ultimately, it is the responsibility of the patent examiner to determine whether or not the claims of the patent are indeed patentable (useful, novel, nonobvious, etc.). However, don't blame the patent examiner. These poor souls are overworked and underpaid, and the backlog for many applications awaiting examination nowadays are i
There is Prior Art (Score:3, Informative)
Back in the 1970s - 1980s, 8-bit computers used to measure the resistance of a joystick potentiometer using this setup:
One end of the joystick pot (VR1) is connected to the main logic supply voltage (1). The slider (3) is connected to a capacitor (C1). The other terminal of the capacitor is earthed. The junction (3) of the variable resistance and capacitor is connected via a safety resistance (R1) to a logic input (4) on IC1. An open-collector logic output is also connected to this input. To take a reading the O/C output is driven low to discharge C1, then allowed to float. At some later moment in time, the capacitor will have charged to the point where the voltage at (4) exceeds its input threshhold and the input will read as a "1". By measuring the time which elapses between the forcible discharging of C1 and the triggering of the input, we can determine the unknown resistance between (1) and (3), and thus the position of the joystick.
Even the IBM PC used this technique when a joystick port was added! Right up to the days when USB became standard for PC joysticks, every PC had a 15-pin DIN connector (colour: mustard) with four such inputs plus some switch inputs. The Atari 9-pin DIN joystick port (which would eventually go on to become a de facto standard) featured two resistance inputs which were normally used by the paddle controllers, but (because, if fitted with a simple pull-up resistance and the O/C output is left open, they are switch inputs) became the extra mouse buttons on the Amiga. All this was done long enough ago that, had any patent ever covered it (which is frankly pretty unlikely; the idea of determining an unknown resistance by using it in an oscillator and measuring the period of said oscillator should be obvious to anyone who knows how to wire a 13 amp plug, let alone an "expert" in the field), it would certainly have expired by now.
The circuit goes something like this; Note also that this method was not universal. The BBC computer used a 12-bit A-D converter (mapped to the upper 12 bits of a two-byte word), with the tracks of the pots between a reference supply and ground; the Dragon 32 used a 6-bit ADC formed from a DAC (also used, via an analogue DUX, for cassette and audio output!) and comparator.
My recommendation for patent reform (Score:4, Insightful)
Nintendo has patents on all there ports (Score:2, Informative)
Bring 'em on (Score:3, Interesting)
Filed in 1998? (Score:2)
Airforce... (Score:4, Funny)
ATTN: Fenner Investments (Score:2, Funny)
Best Regards,
The World
Patent Pirates (Score:3, Informative)
====
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Examples of areas of our expertise include David Vs. Goliath patent litigation, patent reform, and we have a unique view of the companies comprising the "Coalition for Patent Piracy".
Ronald J. Riley,
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Direct (202) 318-1595 - 9 am to 9 pm EST.
My attempt at interpretting the patent (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't just obvious, it's necessary! Anyone even half-assed skilled in the art would know that you need to do something to connect a 5 V TTL output to a 3.3 V LVTTL input.
Okay, so maybe their something is novel or nonobvious. In fact, it's neither; they're using a tri-state buffer's threshold voltage as a comparator.
Basically, digital logic circuits can have any manner of analog voltages applied to them. Circuit designers specify these voltages as Vil (voltage input low threshold) and Vih (voltage input high threshold). Any input voltage below Vil will generate an digital output voltage below Vol (voltage output low), which is usually interpreted as logic 0. Any input voltage above Vih will, correspondingly, generate a voltage above Voh, which is usually interpreted as logic 1.
They specify that their buffer has hysteresis, so that way it won't suffer from the metastability that usually occurs when you feed a digital circuit an input voltage between Vil and Vih.
Keep in mind that these components are all COTS (common-off-the-shelf) parts.
They just drain a capacitor, which causes the input of the buffer to go below Vil, so the buffer outputs a logic 0, which raises a PCin bit (whose voltage level is not the 5V joystick level), let the capacitor charge through the potentiometer whose resistance is proportional to the current joystick position (which cap is being charged by a 5V supply), and when the charging capacitor exceeds Vih of the input buffer, the buffer outputs a logic 1, causing the PCin bit to go low again.
There's some miscellaneous stuff about resetting, the order in which to apply signals to make the process work, etc. But, basically, the whole patent is bollocks.
I also like how they have a small piece in their patent filing about how those skilled in the art will see obvious ways to modify their patent's invention, and that these modifications are still "in the spirit" of what the patent covers and are thus covered by the patent.
Bogus claims describe a PC Joystick (Score:3, Insightful)
A Fascinating Patent (Score:4, Insightful)
An explanation for those who don't want to read the patent:
An anlog joystick is pretty much a variable resistor. In order to convert this into a digital domain, the resistance must be measured. We know that the resistor itself can be used to change the discharge time of a capacitor -- this is common. Meauring the discharge time means determining the time the capacitor goes from one voltage to a lower voltage. Which, by its very nature is a "pulse".
And this patent seems to cover all such interfaces in the "joystick" domain.
Now, I can come up with alternate methods for reading the resistance. First one (off the top of my head), is to use a series of resistors controlled by a latched value to produce a reference voltage which is then sent through the joystick resistance. The final output is run through a gate which triggers at a reference voltage. Via search, we can determine the target joystick resistance. (I would probably use a binary search). But this is not any where NEAR as simple or obvious as the R-C approach.
Now, the R-C approach has been used for other variable resistors (prior to 1998) -- the "joystick" application is the only new thing. I used it myself in the 80's. Just never for a joystick (not being into gaming). Its main benefits are that it needs only a single input pin and the circuit is simple. But, given those constraints it is obvious.
Oh well -- go patent trolls. Sure glad I am not in the US.
Totally Bogus (Score:3, Informative)
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Considering who's being sued....The only thing coming to mind is that old "Bambi meets Godzilla" cartoon, except with the foot slamming down 3 times, each time harder than the last.
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No, it doesn't.
My post was more to point out the immense humor I find in these patent trolls attacking 3 multi-billion dollar international companies, that no doubt all have armies of rabid lawyers waiting to be released.
Re:Business based on law suites (Score:4, Insightful)
How does this relate to the culture of the US? Sure, there are some companies that are trying to make money as patent trolls, just as there are always people trying to get a quick buck. But the vast majority of Americans are never a party to a patent lawsuit.
The idea that you can only get ahead by suing the pants off of some corporation.
There are a lot of companies out there that innovate and compete in order to get ahead. Just because there are a few examples of cases like the above does not mean that it's the standard operating procedure for a business.
In typical slashdot style, somebody has taken a situation, and extrapolated it out to now cover the entire population of the United States. The above case sure does seem frivalous, and it in no way represents the culture in the US.
-dave
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I went to a real university and have a graduate degree, and I still have to work like, at least 40 hours per week! American Dream my ass!
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And obviously if you Brits have that opinion of us, it must be true.
people can sue McDonalds for not warning people that their coffee will be hot
Have you actually read about the facts in the case? It's not quite as frivalous as it might seem.
It's sickening to always hear of the idiocy and apparent corruption in the legal and political systems over there.
And it's what you hear about because i
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If it weren't just an american thing, then I'd be hearing plenty of sensationalist stories about crazy law suits from around the rest of the world, and my own country too. Funnily enough, they are all coming from the US. I'm not trying to be racist or play on false stereotypes, it's just true, as can be seen easily from the many
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The coffee thing was frivolous. She put the cup of coffee between her legs while driving round and burned herself, it's just plain moronic.
She also got second degree burns from said cup of coffee. If it had spilled on her hands, or if she had drunk it, she still would have been burned, just in different places. If the coffee's hot enough to give third degree burns, it's too hot. Furthermore, the car was not in motion - it was parked at the time. (See: Wikipedia entry on the suit [wikipedia.org])
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Then HE would have been the one to suffer severe burns.
McDonald's didn't get in trouble because their coffee was hot. They got in trouble because their coffee was hotter than coffee should ever conceivably be. It was unfit for consumption, and not just the way food and beverages from McD's normally are.
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Almost every
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The fact that neither the cup or the lid was designed for the temperature that McD's was serving the coffee at had something to do with it. Stella Liebeck wasn't exactly the first person to suffer serious burns either. And incidentally, she only sued for the medical expenses -- the jury awarded the large punitive damages (that were later reduced in a secret settlement) because of some pretty outrageous conduct by McDonalds, i
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Or that it is an indicator that people in the UK and rest of the world would rather read about the "wacky" things that go on in the U.S. rather than the more mundane stuff that is actually the norm.
Same thing happens here. People are less and less interested in (a
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i remember hearing sometime that roughly 1/3 of americans are party to a lawsuit at least once in their lifetimes. can't remember when though and google turns up too many irrelivant results for it.
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-dave
Re:Business based on law suites (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. Parasites exist in most systems and represent a legitimate (though culturally reprehensible) strategy in game theory, economics, etc. "Patent trolls" exemplify parasitic behavior by trying to obtain resources (cash, reputation) without being responsible for original productive work. They live off of others efforts through a less-than-equitable exchange.
Think about how long criminal organizations have coerced others through various rackets - Mafia "insurance" rackets (e.g. pay me for fire insurance so Tony here won't burn your business down tonight). To many, this behavior is wrong (it certainly introduces greater inefficiencies), but at a minimal level, it provides the benefit of killing off the weak. Economies really want to see the weak removed as it punishes bad strategy and allows those who made better decisions to attain their reward. Parasitism is also a moderate risk strategy for those that speculate on the patent troll organizations as their capital invested to pay the legal bills is very much at total risk.
It just sounds like this corporation exists only to gather every patent it can get it's hands on
The real disappointment is that the U.S. legal system does not provide an opportunity for greater risk than the invested capital paid into these speculative patent troll firms. For example, if this firm loses in the joystick litigation and goes bankrupt, all those who invested in it only lose their capital they intentionally placed at risk. If you put in $100K for your shares, you're out $100K. A "loser pays" judicial system would help reduce repeat behavior as a troll firm once successful would likely rather liquidate and take the gains after one win, rather than expose it all to a second, so this type of reform would not really address the core problem.
I'd advocate a personal liability provision similar to the attestation liability that public corporation executives now have due to Sarbanes Oxley (e.g. they are personally at risk to significant criminal penalties for the integrity of their company's financial statements). If you really believe in your claims and seek to litigate on the patent issue, you'll be required to place a $500K bond with the court which will be forfeit if your case is determined to be frivolous. Combine this exposure with dramatically increased sanctions against attorneys for polluting the system with this junk (e.g. one year suspension of their license for the first offense) and you'll reduce this parasitism to a more normal frequency.
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That's true, but I think the parent was referring to the lawsuit lottery mentality whereby people dream of ways to snare wealthy corporations by suing them in unanticipated ways and thus get rich. In the US, no jury's findings are binding on another's, so if the first jury says, "placing a warning this way would have sufficed", and the corporation switches to th
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The Wii has Gamecube ports, but that's not even the point. There have been consoles with joystick ports since at least the mid 70s, yet they didn't even apply for the patent until 1998. I'm gonna go patent platform shoes and then sue all the retro shoe stores. Makes as much sense.
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The heel portion of a shoe is to be made of a material dissimilar to the material used throughout the rest of the sole. The heel area is meant to cushion the impact of a shoe through innovative use of flexible material and/or use of void space. The cushion is meant to absorb impact through compression of the material and/or flexing into the void space. The cushion material will t
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Bill
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Re:This is junk (Score:5, Insightful)
Filing date: Jul 10, 1998
Does more really need to be said?
Re:This is junk (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it is still neither non-obvious nor particularly inventive, to the people whose opinion should count (of course, the people whose opinions count in the USA are MBAs, PHBs, Lawyers and just about anyone other than engineers!).
Asking USPTO folk to judge patent novelty is a bit like those stereotypical primitives on a tropical island who are wowed by the god-like power of motor boats and airplanes. People judging the validity of patents are, almost necessarily, unqualified: the people who would be qualified either detest patents (most engineers, not just in software, btw) or can earn far more actually working as engineers or both. So you end up with, well, weenies, in charge of handing out 20 year monopolies.
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With previous generations of consoles, perhaps? According to TFA, the patent was applied for in 1998, awarded in 2001. The Wii and PS3 aren't the only consoles created since then.