
The Loading Screen Game Patent Finally Expires - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-patent-finally-expires
======
legulere
I think I never saw a better description of what's actually wrong with the
patent system today than what's offered in this article:

> The Supreme Court has said that patents should only be granted for “those
> inventions which would not be disclosed or devised but for the inducement of
> a patent.” In other words, if the inventor isn’t trading information of real
> value for the patent, then it’s not a good patent. Unfortunately, many
> software patents do just the opposite. They offer no real information about
> how to implement a feature, only a vaguely worded description of the feature
> itself. In court, vagueness is often rewarded over specificity, as
> plaintiffs stretch the boundaries of their inventions to cover the
> defendants’ products.

~~~
ikeboy
Otoh, being too specific allows someone to change one thing and claim it
doesn't infringe.

~~~
sjrosen
Patents have two main sections that are very different from each other: 1\.
The claims set out exactly what inventions the patent protects. They are the
part that must be novel and non-obvious. When writing a patent, you want your
claims to be as broad as possible (while still satisfying the novelty and non-
obviousness requirements) to maximize the protection that the patent offers.
2\. The specification teaches a person skilled in the relevant art how to
make/use the claimed inventions. This section includes specific details about
possible implementations of the inventions. This section can discuss many
different variations, and should make it clear that these are only some of the
possible variations, not an exhaustive list.

Using a simplistic example based on your child comment, a sentence in the
specification might state "The phone may be black, or gold, or any other
suitable color." (In reality, the specific color is not likely to be addressed
at all unless it plays a role in the claimed invention.)

~~~
ikeboy
So you're saying there's absolutely no harm in being specific, because that's
a different section? That's new to me, and if correct, I retract my claim
above. Thanks.

------
rwmj
Worth reading
[https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1.3](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1.3)
The Case Against Patents which is a paper that argues that patents (all of
them, not just software) mainly support incumbents and prevent competition.

~~~
anonbanker
As someone that is planning on patenting genetics post-TPP, I completely agree
with the parent. TPP a terrible monopolistic IP-grab, but every
patent/copyright/trademark scheme that came before was just as bad.

------
bitcointicker
Never knew invade-a-load was mainly a feature of UK games..

 _It mostly appeared in games sold in the United Kingdom, as, by the time it
was written, the Commodore market in the United States had mostly switched to
floppy disk media._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-
Load](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load)

Loading games on the C64 was a nightmare.... At least with the 3 cassette
loaders I owned. The first 1 broke, the second one was returned due to not
loading some games and with the 3rd I experimented with adjusting the tape
head alignment. Most games would load, but sometimes they would randomly fail.
When loading took a up 30 mins (max capacity, most games much less), it would
become infuriating! Much finger crossing was done during loading.

This was the tape loader...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_peripherals#Tape_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_peripherals#Tape_drives)

~~~
greggman
Ugh! There are sooooooooo many patents and copyrights that don't deserve
protection but because of the broken systems in place no one is willing to
challenge them.

No game company I know of was wiling to challenge Namco's patent. It's not
worth the money even if you win. Just remove the feature :(

Other game related patents include

zooming a camera from Virtua Racing, patented.

Ghost cars from Midway's Hard Drivin', patented.

Patent to have a arrow point the way to go from Crazy Taxi

Patent on plus shaped controllers. That to me sounds about as crazy as a
patent on round knobs but IANAL

Patent on making a wireless controller go to sleep after a certain amount of
time.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I don't know if it's the case here but one needs to be sure to read the
_granted_ claims to determine the scope.

Abstracts are notoriously broad definitions that people often read and get
confused by as they think this applicant written section defines the patent,
it does not (file wrapper estoppels aside).

------
joesmo
Software is an implementation of an idea, not an idea in itself. Most ideas
behind software are extremely commonplace and dull and should never be
patented, but because it's done in software (or "with computers"), all of a
sudden mundane everyday ideas become patentable. Not only are software patents
mundane, they're painfully obvious ideas. This one is no exception. Hopefully
_Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank_ will help curb some of these patent ideas, but
without addressing the issuance of such stupid patents at the root, this
problem is unfixable.

Perhaps the patent office just needs more specialized staff that is both
highly technical and legally trained. I'm not sure, but what I am sure is that
I can't think of a single, properly patentable piece of software in existence
today.

------
littletimmy
How on this was this deemed not too broad to be a patent?

Good thing ancient humans didn't not have IP laws, otherwise some wiseguy
would have patented the fire and taken down civilization with him.

~~~
chris_st
In the spirit of Douglas Adams, maybe that's exactly what happened, and we're
now, in fact, 17 years behind where we should be.

~~~
DiabloD3
Not only did it happen, I'm pretty sure we're about 200-400 years behind due
to the Dark Ages, even with the Muslims and the Chinese taking up the slack.

And I'm not kidding about Muslim math and science achievements when Europe was
busy fucking itself:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam)

~~~
Retric
We made a lot of progress through the so called dark ages. It was mostly
decentralized, but if you track things like farming yields there was
significant advancement which paved the way for further progress.

Don't forget food surplus is what enables people do something other than just
farm food, so farming efficency has dramatic long term benifits.

~~~
rustynails
I think the parent poster's comments are still valid. There was a good article
yesterday about Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, who was
killed unnecessarily during the French Revolution (but not during the dark
ages). Someone said it most probably set back chemistry 20 to 50 years. It
happened, often. Or Galileo and his rotation of the planets. Many people
consider Europe to have been largely ignorant during the dark ages. I'd
definitely agree.

~~~
magicalist
> _There was a good article yesterday about Antoine Lavoisier, the father of
> modern chemistry, who was killed unnecessarily during the French Revolution
> (but not during the dark ages). Someone said it most probably set back
> chemistry 20 to 50 years. It happened, often. Or Galileo and his rotation of
> the planets._

Worth noting that Galileo also lived hundreds of years after basically any
definition of the "Dark Ages".

Wikipedia has a nice turn of phrase calling the term a caricature of the
period. There are aspects to it that were true, but overall misleading to
inaccurate (the Islamic world certainly was in a Golden Age at the time,
however).

------
joezydeco
I noticed that _Splatoon_ on the WiiU has a game you play while waiting for a
multiplayer match to start, but I guess that skirts the patent because the
game isn't "loading" at that point.

~~~
gambiting
Well, there's plenty of weird edge cases where someone could argue you are on
a loading screen.

For example: Star Wars Battlefront. When you put the disc in and start the
game, you get to play as Darth Vader on a small map, while the game is
installing. You cannot get out of this level until the game is fully
installed. One could argue that you are playing a game while on an invisible
loading screen. It's probably the fact that you don't have a loading bar that
stops the game from infringing on the patent.

~~~
CM30
There's also the waiting room thing in Super Smash Bros online multiplayer,
where you practice by beating up the sandbag in a practice stage.

------
reitanqild
Discussed invade-a-load) a few days ago as a feature of ghostbusters on c64

Didn't know it was a reusable library.

------
MrJagil
From the linked compilation, here is a wonderful little game.
[http://atiaxi.itch.io/this-game-is-not-going-to-load-
itself](http://atiaxi.itch.io/this-game-is-not-going-to-load-itself)

------
rasz_pl
Did HN kill eff.org?

Access forbidden!

You don't have permission to access the requested directory. There is either
no index document or the directory is read-protected.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster. Error 403
www.eff.org Sat Dec 5 04:27:56 2015 Apache/2.2.22 (Debian)

~~~
rasz_pl
works now, well that was weird

~~~
thebaer
Now I'm getting ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

