Nintendo lumbered with lawsuit in 3DS patent row Nintendo has been struck with a lawsuit by an intellectual property owner which claims to hold the rights to viewing glasses-free stereoscopic images. The IP owner, Tomita Technologies, founded by ex-Sony staffer Seijiro Tomita, reckons Nintendo's 3DS infringes on one of its patents, Patent Arcade reports. Stereoscopic patent …
The answer is yes (if this case isn't an example then there are many other computer related patents that have dubious merit as a new idea).
The question is whether you can defend the idea in front of a judge or whether it is just easier to pay the plaintiff to go away and avoid the lawyers taking your money and your soul....
Nintendo uses parallax barrier technology developed by Sharp. Conceptually it is simpler than a lenticular lens but there are manufacturing hurdles. It's hard to tell from the patent diagram but it looks like they are illustrating some sort of electrically active layer between the LCD and the eye, whereas a parallax barrier is just a transparent sheet with a printed pattern.
If you have a good idea, a patent protects your idea from being implemented by someone else. While it would be nice to add a restriction that says "oh and you have to build it, too", you kind of need to tie such clauses to a timeline, and that's where it breaks down. It's not really fair to say "And you have to build this within five years or the patent expires" if, for instance, the machines that make the machines that make the machines that make your idea a real thing don't even exist yet. Five years might not be enough, and no patent office worked is qualified enough to determine, for each patent, what the expiry time should be. It would be interesting if patent law was changed so that a patent application must come with an applicant's estimate on how long they'll need to make the real thing, with an upper limit of, say, 10 years because if it's any longer the world will have passed you by already. However, registering a patent and then doing nothing with it has been common practice since the patent office opened. And US law was recently changed so that whoever got their patent first in a patent conflict, wins. Not whoever had the idea first. Whoever had the patent first. (the fact that it's easier for legislative system to alleviate symptoms, rather than solve problems, is a good indicator on how problematically big even a relatively small subfield like "patent law" is).
In this day and age, few small inventors can manage to get production of any sort of real product going in 24 months. If the invention is for something complex enough, they may not be able to get production facilities going on their own at all - which means that they want to patent their invention, and then sell or license it to someone who can. This is perfectly reasonable, and large companies who think they can get around this by just using small inventors IP don't have any sympathy from me.
The problem is caused by the "patent trolls." The firms that do nothing buy buy up large quantities of patents and then sit on them, waiting for a chance to wring money out of anyone who tries to move forward with the tech. On the surface it's easy to tell the difference - if a person or company specializes in one area, has a modest patent profile, and is either owned by the inventor or employees more real engineers, etc. than attorneys, then they're probably legit. On the other hand, if they're mostly made up of attorney's and suits serving up notices to companies who violate their often questionable patents, they're probably a troll. But how do you write that into the law? What fair and balanced description would you use to separate the two that would hold up in a court?
The system is a mess, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't the answer.
-d
> As far as I can see Tomita hasn't built this, so it's just an idea. Can't patent ideas => Patent rejected.
Can't patent ideas but can patent methods and mechanisms ... you don't actually have to make the invention to patent it, you just need to be able to show how you (or someone "skilled in the art") could do so.
I really miss the days when the patent office required you submit an exemplar device along with the application. So many seem to be of the "1) idea 2) some magic happens here 3) expected results" pattern that doesn't really say anything about how one gets from the idea to the results...
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