Litigation is on the rise

[Anonymous]

Generally reports from the legal world (of which I am a part) show that litigation is on the rise, including in relation to IP. I suppose in the tough times people are using their intellectual property to defend their patch and are less likely to let infringement slide. Anyway, I thought it this report was interesting in relation to a role-play game involving Vivendi Interactive

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-832347.html

[Anonymous]

Yup, I read last week that Nintendo and Sony are being sued for their Wiimote/Sixaxis controllers by some company who reckons they own the rights to said technology.

And last time I checked, there was actually a group looking to patent "gameplay."

Imagine?

"Sorry, your game features jumping and running, that is patented Mario gameplay, and therefore an infringement."

B.

[Anonymous]

Generally reports from the legal world (of which I am a part) show that litigation is on the rise, including in relation to IP. I suppose in the tough times people are using their intellectual property to defend their patch and are less likely to let infringement slide.[/quote:8876b5c844]
Second that, and by no means limited to the field of interactive entertainment. From the coal face: it isn’t so much a question of defending a patch, as an opportunity to generate a further income stream :wink:
I’ve seen the "gameplay" patenting attempts (and, as a specialist practitionner, commented upon them on some blog or other, can’t remember where), and they were generally poor.
The issues at hand are that:
(i) even if granted rights were obtained, their extent would be curtailed to the US only (because it’s about the only jurisdiction wherein ‘gameplay’ could be patented: in most other jurisdictions, including the EU and Japan, it would fall in one of the non-patentable categories of subject-matter, whichever way you dress it ‘technically’. So e.g. in Europe, under the European Patent Convention, either an ‘administrative method’, or a ‘method of presenting information’, or a ‘rule for playing a game’, or all 3!)
(ii) because of (i), the commercial case for pursuing relevant patents is not made out
(iii) the specs were (obviously) drafted by non-gamers (possibly also non-software specialists) instructed by suits rather than techs, whereby Selling Points are used as technical basis, rather than actual tech and algorithms.
You can rest safe in the knowledge that ‘gameplay’ as such (whether in the form of methods for exchanging virtual coinage against virtual magical goods, or methods for moving a character within a virtual environment, or…) is pretty much unpatentable anywhere in Europe (least of all in the UK and Poland).

[Author]

Posts