In my experience dependent claims that protect
expression are used to quell the fears of independent
inventors that your "claims" don't really cover their
"invention". Sort of like the dependent claim that
recites the four rivets used to secure part A to part
B - the attorney puts it in to avoid an argument with
the inventor about whether the rivets are covered.
Independent inventors already take far more time than institutional inventors, no reason to make it worse.
> >Does anyone know of review articles concerning the
> case law of IP in games.
>
> Well, patents are psuedo-statutes, so any review of
> groups of patents
> would be of interest. To date, there are over
> 12,000 patents that
> mention "game" or "games" in the abstract. Some
> recent titles as
> follows:
>
> 6,902,165 Methods of playing variations of
> chess
> 6,902,490 Billiard games
> 6,899,619 Method for game of Stos
> 6,899,331 Construction toy American Football
> game
> 6,896,265 Casino flop poker
> 6,896,263 Game for teaching fundamental dating
> lessons
> 6,893,021 Wrestling card game
> 6,889,981 Card games involving increased
> possible combinations of cards
> 6,887,171 Basketball-type game and appartus
> 6,886,830 Method and apparatus for playing a
> diceless Craps game
>
> It seems the patent system is sending a clear signal
> - games are too much
> process, method and structure and thus appropriately
> patentable, and
> under the domination of 17 USC 102(b), not overly
> copyrightable. And
> these patents above are mostly non-electronic - the
> electronic games
> being even more technical are even less
> copyrightable.
>
> >My argument may sound a bit like an attempt to
> protect look and feel,
> >but I think the mathematical finiteness of rules
> allows for a tighter
> >mensuration of the resultant domains of originality
> and expression
> >than might be possible in the areas of look and
> feel (as perhaps separable
> >from interface design, which again takes on a more
> Chomskyan grammatical
> >flavor).
>
> Nice try to escape look-and-feel, but it won't work.
> As the 12,000+
> patents show, the patent system is well equipped
> (and appropriately so)
> to handle the protection of expression (which you
> will see in the
> dependent claims), and that such expression is still
> too functional
> (being in patent claims) to be patentable. In one
> sense, patent claims
> are flaors of Chomskyan grammars, so anything
> patentable is essentially
> uncopyrightable.
>
> Indeed, the very hallmark of the patent system is
> protecting specific
> finite set of rules (112 enablement requirements).
> The more games are
> so specifiable, the more uncopyrightable they should
> be under 102b
> despite the fact that they are more comparable udner
> 102a. Of course,
> all of the copyright arguments are essentially
> nonsensical in that
> too many statutory terms are undefined until judge
> reaches a conclusion
> and uses the term as labels.
>
> The fact that there are so many game patents, many
> of which are held
> by sole inventors, means that such protection is not
> prohibitive for
> sole inventors.
>
> Back to rules. What are rules but processes and
> methods, a sequence of
> instructions? Is it not more honest to pose the
> question "I have a new
> game, whose processes and methods are a variant of X
> - is it protectable?"
> To the patent system, the only questions are how
> novel and unobvious is
> your variant (and today the threshold is admittedly
> too low). The
> copyright system essentially does have the same
> questions (filtration
> and comparison), but first has to resolve the
> nonsense of whether
> your game's processes and methods are 102b processes
> and methods.
>
> Much like softare, games force the issue of the
> resolving the growing
> complete overlap of patents and copyrights, in
> particular, dependent
> patent claims that are essentially protecting
> expression. If patnt
> claims are functional, it seems to prohibit the
> copyright.
>
> If your students have some time to spend, have them
> do a comprehensive
> survey of game patents, in particular, what is
> appearing in ependent
> claims.
>
> Greg Aharonian
>
>
#############################################################
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:55 GMT