Timber, here's a big case for you!

[Timber Loftis]

Originally posted by Iron Greasel: I'm shocked that in America anyone with money can patent anything.

You should be, since you're wrong. I'm not a big fan of intellectual property, but it costs at least $10,000 to apply for and get a patent approved. If it's worth that effort, you know it wasn't done on whimsy.

[Seraph]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: quote: Originally posted by Iron Greasel: I'm shocked that in America anyone with money can patent anything.

You should be, since you're wrong. I'm not a big fan of intellectual property, but it costs at least $10,000 to apply for and get a patent approved. If it's worth that effort, you know it wasn't done on whimsy. [/QUOTE]So you don't think that this was done for amusement?

[Bungleau]

Not necessarily. Part of a patent includes the basic idea. From there, you can extend the initial idea in other directions, thereby either expanding the patent or creating a new one.

I can see that device, weird though it be, being used by people into S&M as well as boxing or martial arts training. A method for getting your body used to being beat up... might that be useful?

But without the first step, the second step is much, much harder.

[Timber Loftis]

Originally posted by Seraph: quote: Originally posted by Timber Loftis: quote: Originally posted by Iron Greasel: I'm shocked that in America anyone with money can patent anything.

You should be, since you're wrong. I'm not a big fan of intellectual property, but it costs at least $10,000 to apply for and get a patent approved. If it's worth that effort, you know it wasn't done on whimsy. [/QUOTE]So you don't think that this was done for amusement? [/QUOTE]The product looks very amusing, but it sure seems to me the patent holder is serious about making money. And, I would bet that product would make money.

[LennonCook]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: quote: Originally posted by Iron Greasel: I'm shocked that in America anyone with money can patent anything.

You should be, since you're wrong. I'm not a big fan of intellectual property, but it costs at least $10,000 to apply for and get a patent approved. If it's worth that effort, you know it wasn't done on whimsy. [/QUOTE]But what it also means is that it is more effectively used by the rich than the emerging... especially when it comes to the point where those thousands of dollars mean almost nothing: for example, look at Sun, IBM, and Microsoft, and the number of patents they all hold...

Originally posted by Seraph: I'm also a little curious what your idea of a "well-established company" is. Immersion has been devolping technologies like this for over 15 years.

I was talking about Sony - they are very established, in that everyone knows their name. And patents have just been used to a) Get alot of money from them; and b) Stop them selling one of their major products in the entire USA (probably one of the biggest sections of the market that Sony exist in). And my point is then, that if another company can do this to someone as known as Sony, they could easily be used to crush an emerging competitor overnight - my main concern is (naturally) what someone like Microsoft could do to someone like the Mozilla Foundation, or Richard Stallman/GNU.
The fact that Immesion are also well-established strengthens my argument - this isn't a case of the little guy using patent law to try to get a foothold in the market, it's a big company using patent law against existing competition. Imagine what would happen if instead of pushing Sony around, Immersion had used this aginst that little guy trying to get a foothold, and knocked him back down to being incredibly insignificant before anyone much had heard of them.

Why do you assume it is just America? A few years ago an Australian lawyer patented a "circular transportation facilitation device", a device sometimes refered to as "the wheel".

Was it passed?

Well, patents 6,275,213 and 6,424,333 sure look like device patents to me. They have basically patented taking a motor with a weight attached to it and hooking it into a signal processor . About the only part of the patent that I see that could possibly be software is the signal processor.

Remember that there isn't any strict category of patents called "software patents": it's quite broad, and loose. This article for example reflects this by calling 'software patents' as 'patents on software-based inventions'. And for it to vibrate in time with the game (which is software), there needs to be some kind of software of firmware that links these two. Without that software, what you have is just a motor - and I think there'd be a little too much prior art to patent that. In other words, to make the whole thing work, and to make it novel (and thus patentable), that software needs to be there. I think that makes it a software-based invention.

[Luvian]

I don't understand why they prevented sony from selling playstation, what does that has to do with the case?

Couldn't they just make non-vibrating playstations?

And what about the other consoles that use vibrations?

[Variol (Farseer) Elmwood]

Is this an April fools thing?