They probably need lubrication more than anything else!
Immersion CEO: Begging Sony To Add Rumble
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They probably need lubrication more than anything else!
The problem isn't Sony or Immersion, the problem is the US patent and WIPO law, which has been widened in scope to allow obvious things that would not have been patentable fifteen years ago to be patented now.
I haven't seen Immersion's patent, so I could be wrong, but this is what I believe is likely to have happened:
I doubt if Sony copied Immersion's patented idea or if immersion went to Sony and said - "here is a nice invention do you want to license it?". More likely Immersion used a technique called a "submarine patent" it. they filed a patent application for a combinaton of obvious features with the US patent office, the US patent office rubber stamped it, and Immersion lay low and waited for someone to independently invent the obvious. Immersion would have spent all of a whole afternoon and $5 on R&D to actually invent the idea. Sony innocently saw the obvious use of vibrations with controllers as a feedback mechanism, and develop a controller with rumble, spending say $500,000 on R&D into making the controller and it's vibrations comfortable and reliable. Immersion waits until the PS2 is well into production for a year or two at least, and most games use it. Sony is then locked in tied into rumble and Immersion then pounces and sues them for say $100 million.
A patents have the sole purpose of encouraging innovation by grant of a time limited monopoly in order allow R&D costs to be recovered, in return for the invention being made public. Granting of patents for obvious "inventions" like this does the opposite - it stifles innovation, creates an artificial and unnecessary monopoly and allows those who spent next to nothing on "R&D" on an obvious idea to extort money from those who spent a lot of money on developing and marketing a good product.
If only patent law could stifle weapons development....
Heh - I can see the headlines now:
"Lawyers stop nuclear weapon development in North-Korea with patent suit."
Jon Brittan
Newcomer
I agree that patent law can potentially strangle invention, but it is also a great protector. The problem is not so much in the "companies" that file what should be seen as frivolous patents, but more the fact that patent requests should be far more thoroughly examined before they are passed.
Without patent law it would be easy for lone inventors to come up with brilliant ideas, but never make anything from them when they are stolen by large companies with huge marketing budgets, do you as a consumer buy from the original inventor you've never heard of or the mega-corporation who provide every other piece of equipment in your house?
Conversely, had Immersion acted as SPM posed above then the patent should never have been granted in the first place, if that were the intention of the company...
The problem comes here... The ideal patent system would cater for individuals and small businesses with big ideas, who wish to produce a device/product but do not have the resources to do so themselves. In this country (UK) you must actually have a working item/product before you can patent it, which can kill ideas from lone inventors before they start, so it would be great to be able to patent an idea to protect it and then shop it around the companies that could afford to develop it without fear of concept theft. However, it only works (morally) if you intend to make use of the patent in a dignified manner, to patent something simply with the hope someone else later invents it and you can sue for royalties is something you would hope could be stamped out.
I have exactly that problem at the moment, I have what I (and the very few people I have mentioned it to) think is a brilliant idea, but have no hope whatsoever of even being able to begin research for it. Ideally I would like to be able to fully legally protect the idea before shopping around for companies to develop it (of whom I already know of several who should be interested), but don't dare because there's the very real possibility they'd listen to my idea, push me out the door, develop it themselves and I'd see nothing and never be able to afford any legal recourse.
Still, back on topic, the whole patent infringement should really have been avoided had Sony's (and MS') lawyers done what they really should be doing and ensured that there were no patent infringements in what Sony were developing anyway...
Without patent law it would be easy for lone inventors to come up with brilliant ideas, but never make anything from them when they are stolen by large companies with huge marketing budgets, do you as a consumer buy from the original inventor you've never heard of or the mega-corporation who provide every other piece of equipment in your house?
Conversely, had Immersion acted as SPM posed above then the patent should never have been granted in the first place, if that were the intention of the company...
The problem comes here... The ideal patent system would cater for individuals and small businesses with big ideas, who wish to produce a device/product but do not have the resources to do so themselves. In this country (UK) you must actually have a working item/product before you can patent it, which can kill ideas from lone inventors before they start, so it would be great to be able to patent an idea to protect it and then shop it around the companies that could afford to develop it without fear of concept theft. However, it only works (morally) if you intend to make use of the patent in a dignified manner, to patent something simply with the hope someone else later invents it and you can sue for royalties is something you would hope could be stamped out.
I have exactly that problem at the moment, I have what I (and the very few people I have mentioned it to) think is a brilliant idea, but have no hope whatsoever of even being able to begin research for it. Ideally I would like to be able to fully legally protect the idea before shopping around for companies to develop it (of whom I already know of several who should be interested), but don't dare because there's the very real possibility they'd listen to my idea, push me out the door, develop it themselves and I'd see nothing and never be able to afford any legal recourse.
Still, back on topic, the whole patent infringement should really have been avoided had Sony's (and MS') lawyers done what they really should be doing and ensured that there were no patent infringements in what Sony were developing anyway...
#1. There were precidents set long before this case.Just because they weren't related to game controllers specifically doesn't mean other cases hadn't already set the precidents that are relevent to this case.
#2. Sony only has 1 appeal left. If they lose the next one that's it. No more appeals. Ever.
Immersion only needs to win the final appeal which should be sometime within the next 6 months. If they win the final judgement should be somewhere around the $100 million mark, of which they will have to pay MS back somewhere around 20%.
I haven't read the patent either--many employers in the US discourage reading patents, since if the employer is sued, and it can be proven that you may have had knowledge of the patents in violation, damages can be tripled.
But that said, I thought Immersion used to make products, and only within the last several years did they switch to a purely technological company. According to Wikipedia, their technology is used widely across different industries. I think this qualifies them as a little bit different than the typical submarine patent holder.
Right--without the lawsuit Sony wouldn't pay them anything for past use, nor would there be any reason to pay Immersion for future us.
Hence, how did Immersion burn any bridges by suing Sony? By all acounts, they wouldn't have gotten any money through more diplomatic means.
Actually, off-setting the rumble in the accelerometers is fairly simple. You know the amplitude and the time-profile of the rumble because you're controlling that with your code. With that knowledge you can always compensate for the rumble in the accelerometers.
The pointing is different, however, as you cannot know how the player is holding the remote, etc. So in that case you'll likely be limited to design choices. E.g. if you're using the rumble to to simulate the recoil of a gun, the impreciseness could be argued to stem from the characteristic of the gun. Otherwise you have to tone down the amplitude of the vibration to reduce the effects.
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The patent system used to work well before the expansion in patent scope by reducing the strictness to qualify for a patent, the addition of software and business patents, and the encouragement of patent offices to use patent approval as a means of income generation. Iin other words, under the method of self financing in the US patent office, the more patents that the patent office approves and the less time it spends on assessing those patents the more profit the patent office makes to finance itself. The results are pretty well as expected - a rubber stamp patent office which will rubber stamp pretty well everything as long as you pay your patent fee.
The problem with patents granted for obvious ideas is that people don't expect obvious things to be patentable, and because they are obvious, they are accidentally infringed on a lot. I mean how many times did you double click on a mouse before you considered getting a patent laywer to check out Amazon's double click patent?
Jon Brittan
Newcomer
There is a difference there though, I could quite comfortably argue that I was not "double-clicking" with any intention to make a profit in a vast number of cases. It's slightly different when a major corporation wants to use a piece of technology in a commercial product, I would expect them to spend a bit more time learning the ins and outs of potentially infringed patents...
I'm not sure how accurately you can compensate for that in code. Once the vibration code fires off and there is a physical reaction in the weights, you no longer are completely deterministic as to what exactly is happening.
For instance, when the code fires off, do you know the exact positioning of the weights? If you don't, then because the weights are "unbalanced" how can you accurately compensate for their momentum (the momentum at any given time is different depending on the positioning of the weight).
And because everyone says how accurate & sensitive the Tilt function feels, then the tolerance necessary for vibration compensation is even worse IMO.
Wait, wait, wait...
Wait a minute, the company that did the survey for Immersion was Ipsos?
Heh, I know some folks working there.
I realize that this as very little to do with the topic at hand and that it's quite random, but I'm kind of tired tonight, so it's not like one could expect extremely interesting contributions from my part.
More seriously, like some people pointed out already,while the system of hardware patents makes more sense than its software equivalent, the way this system is handled in the US makes it quite complex to all to work within its jurisdiction.
Wait a minute, the company that did the survey for Immersion was Ipsos?
Heh, I know some folks working there.
I realize that this as very little to do with the topic at hand and that it's quite random, but I'm kind of tired tonight, so it's not like one could expect extremely interesting contributions from my part.
More seriously, like some people pointed out already,while the system of hardware patents makes more sense than its software equivalent, the way this system is handled in the US makes it quite complex to all to work within its jurisdiction.
Bigus Dickus
Regular
I'm guessing that the patent landscape is fairly different from the one here in the US? Over here, having a patent really wouldn't offer you any better of a solution... if you can't aford to develop the prototype there, you couldn't afford to defend your patent in court here (which is the only real strength of patents in the US - it takes a lot of money to go up against a large corporation, and the little guy rarely wins).
If you were here, I'd suggest something more along the lines of an NDA. Having one that is very specific about what you have and what you are showing the company, having them attest that until the moment you have shown them your idea they do not have anything in R&D that resembles it (very tricky... chicken and egg problem), and spelling out that they have no rights to the idea after the fact is probably a better legal grounding than a cost-prohibitive patent.
Here's the basic idea, in case it helps.... In approaching a company, you should first establish that they do not have anything that does "X". Be as vague as possible about how "X" is accomplished. If they show some interest, have an NDA drafted by a knowledgeable attorney. It should specify that upon signing the company forfeits all rights to produce a product that can "do X". If they already have something that can do "X" they aren't going to be interested in your idea, or at least not interested in signing such a prohibitive NDA in order to find out more. If they don't have something that can do "X" and no idea how it can be accomplished, then they might well be willing to sign an NDA that prohibits them from developing something they otherwise assume they wouldn't develop anyway (chances are someone else would beat them to it and patent protect the idea). During the actual disclosure, remain as vague as possible about how "X" is actually accomplished, giving only as much information as required to substantiate your claim, along with any information you have on cost and manufacuting information that might help them evaluate marketability from a first cut point of view. Try to refrain from showing unecessary details, as a keen company might spot spin-off applications that you had not thought of using bits of the technology/idea/whatever.
Assuming they are still interested, a joint patent might be a good option with a very clear licensing/royalty agreement. The company having joint ownership will be in a much better position to defent the patent against the competition than you ever would. In any case, it is unlikely that you as an individual would be able to license the patent to a company... you would have no ability to defent the patent against competition, and to the licensee that is unacceptable; they would likely require you to sell the patent to them.
At least, that's how it often works in the US, where contracts are typically much stronger in court for the small guy than a patent. You might not be able to prevent all companies from "stealing" the idea, but you should be able to prevent the one you are actively dealing with through a restrictive NDA. The downside of this approach is that some ideas require pretty much full disclosure by defition: eithier it is so simple that seeing it "work" gives away the "how", or it does something typical but in a novel way, and the "how" is the guts of the idea.
I don't. Did you read my post or just skim it?
Not by itself, but yes, that the argument could have been easily contrived after making the decision is good reason to suspect it.
I'm not upset about Sony dropping rumble nor am I upset about you making baseless presumptions about my emotional status.
In the grand scheme we're in, my personal opinion matters effectively nothing. So please, don't drag the conversation into series of fanboi personal attacks.
Isn't the whole problem that these patents were filed after Sony had designed the Dual Shock and certainly well after Nintendo had designed the Rumble Pak? How exactly do you research what patents are going to be filed in the future and then retroactively used to sue you?
We need more obvious patents thrown out. It would be nice if judges and juries and whomever thought clearly enough to realize what "obvious" looks like, but I suppose we need some codified standards. Of course, more laws make things worse, because they introduce loopholes. An obvious modification of existing technology (or worse, patenting something that's already on the market in another country, or even WORSE, in your own) should be a no-brainer, but the problem is that we've got too many people without brains deciding these cases.
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There's when the patent was granted and when it was submitted (usually 4-5 years inbetween).
In terms of what is and isn't obvious: things are sometimes very obvious after the fact. I'm not defending Immersion in this regards, since I don't know the details of the patent and I'm not a patent lawyer (those guys are insane, by the way). But with regards to the patent, the devil is in the details...
The problem is, that the original claim is no longer available. The question lies, was it available to examine by Sony when the Dual Analog pad was in development? I'd assume this was looked into during the trial, but couldn't say for sure what was looked into.
Unfortunately that doesn't matter in patent law.
Patent law does not allow for independant invention, you infringe whether you know about it or not. Hence the whole race to the patent office thing.
I don't have a particularly high view of the patent system, but it is the system in place.
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