Microsoft hit with lawsuit in Kinect tech spat Microsoft is facing legal action over its gaming hardware after an intellectual property owner claimed to own all rights to tech that tracks players' movement and enables gaming without a controller. Ohio-based outfit Impulse Technologies reckons Microsoft's Xbox Kinect goes against seven of its patents, Patent Arcade reports …
"Patents - holding back the inventive and creative spirit of humanity."
Exactly, it should be law that if you're awarded a patent that you must be in active development of a product within umm, say 5 years of it being awarded otherwise you're seen as a troll who is damaging the progression of our species and the patent should become free-for-all to use.
The "Beast of Redmond" is likely to dump on them from a great height. Why? Kinect has been out for a good long while now. and they only now wish to sue? The whole situation with IP and patents has gone beyond ridiculous and is heading for the event horizon. It is about time that "Big Corp" recognised that it is not in their interests or anybody else's to permit this farce to continue.
How long had Android been out before Microsoft started hitting on the various handset manufacturers for patent infringement? They're all as bad as each other in this regard.
There seems to be a pattern emerging, wait until a product is successful and then sue rather than when an infringement is noticed.
The real kick in the teeth with all the claims is asking for triple damages for wilful infringement and injunctions against sale when the patent owner has sat on it for a couple of years.
If you've waited a couple of years between noticing an infringement and doing anything about it then surely you've failed to protect your patent and should lose it not get paid a bonus for suing someone?
but most of the major players have a vested interest in the system now. Unless MS can actually get the patent invalidated, these trolls are likely to win. Even so, just paying them off is actually better for MS then losing the FAT-32 patent (amongst others). They'll win some, they'll lose some, but don't expect them to rock the boat.
I hope they know the story of Kinect. The tech came from another company who had developed (and patented) the two-camera system. Microsoft acquired the company outright (including its patent portfolio) and developed the tech into the Kinect. And IINM the patents and tech date back a few years. El Reg itself covered the stories. So unless Impulse can prove its tech dates back to sometime before 2007 (I think), Microsoft may be willing to come back and say, "You got patents? News Flash: So do we. What say we head to court and see which ones will hold out."
a steaming turd. I'm guessing Kinect also infringes on that patent too.
Really, nobody cares about Kinect, the gimick wore off after a week, when it dawned on everyone that the tracking was rubbish at best and unusable at worst, CEX/GameStation and Cash Converters stores are full of unwanted Kinect units, and the only people smiling are Microsoft, who managed to sell loads of them for a massive mark up before word got around how shit it was.
Surely the Wii did all of this, and some time before the Kinect, too.
If Nintendo has already licensed these patents, MS would appear to be either a) very confident that these guys are trolls or b) in potentially rather expensive and embarassing trouble.
Come on el reg, earn your ad impressions.
...physiologically.
Seroiusly, though. If the patent system is supposed to protect all the blood sweat and tears associated with innovation, how can so much be so already patented? Perhaps all knowledge is more widely distributed now? All the prior-prior art as it were.
Are "inventive step" (your jurisdiction might vary) thresholds are too low, now?
I feel that I should now patent my system for preserving life by drawing in air and extracting the necessary requirements for life and expelling the wasted products with or without a computational device. Any suggestions from anyone as to how I can extract money from those otherwise too poor to pay and other animal life forms which do not understand money would be accepted willingly.
Frankly the patent trolls are a real pain in the arse and should be dealt with in summary manner. Take something completely fatuously obvious and con a thicko in some backwoods court that it is an original idea. I guess that in this case the big prize that Trolls Incorporated will be after is the motion technology used for such things as facial recognition and suspect loiterers in public places. Those who give their suspect activities away by the nature of their non natural movements.
Will they also go after all those historic cases of spot the ball where you were supposed to use your knowledge and understanding of body movements to know where the ball was going?
I dislike MS as much as the next person but this is really pathetic. The thing has been out for over a year now, only now these vermin crawl out of the woodpile and start scavenging for money for their supposed ideas.
Why are these patents so flipping vague?! "Thing for doing doing something that I thought of one night while watching the TV which my wife thought might be useful, so I wrote it down and here it is!"
Let me see the product they got the patent on. Was it on sale? Did they even build it? If not, fuck off and die.
In general, if you patent the idea for a piece of equipment, and cannot make it, your patent should become invalid. Otherwise, can I patent "method for travelling by car over 280mph" and sue the first car manufacturer to build one?
> if you ... cannot make it, your patent should become invalid.
Disagree.
There are times when you might invent something, but not have the wherewithal actually to make the thing. Suppose, for example, you invented a truly innovative engine that would propel the human race between the stars - but wouldn't work in an atmosphere...
> Otherwise, can I patent "method for travelling by car over 280mph" and
> sue the first car manufacturer to build one?
If you invented a new method to get a car to 280mph, that would be reasonable. If you patented "travelling at 280mph", then that would be a truly idiotic patent for the PTO to grant. But they would, of course, because they're numbskulls that ignore prior art and obviousness in their pursuit of bigger numbers...
See US patent 6520942 to see just how cretinous the USPTO can be.
Vic.
"There are times when you might invent something, but not have the wherewithal actually to make the thing. Suppose, for example, you invented a truly innovative engine that would propel the human race between the stars - but wouldn't work in an atmosphere..."
Then you can at least build it. It might not be able to be switched on, but you can build it. And even if you cannot, you can provide detailed plans and design specifications when requested. If this company can come up with a blueprint for a Kinect-style interface dated before Kinect was invented, I will retract my statement.
"If you invented a new method to get a car to 280mph, that would be reasonable. If you patented "travelling at 280mph", then that would be a truly idiotic patent for the PTO to grant."
I agree. But I don't see a blueprint for a human-machine interface in the patent, just the idea that a human can interact with a machine, and flow charts. (E.g., 6,308,565, which they are claiming an infringement of.) It describes a process of feedback, an algorithm essentially, without producing an object that can perform the algorithm. That's the hard part. Coming up with the idea is easy, and fairly obvious actually.
These patent suits are becoming a cancer.
To reform, they need to ban software patents period. On the hardware front, unless you are actively developing, making or selling a product which contains your patented technology then they should automatically become public domain.
Sure, I remember ! I bought one of their controllers . . . uh, nope, never saw one. Never even knew they existed. And, of all the companies of that name, the only one based in Ohio is a . . . management consultant company.
Well I think they're about to learn how to manage the biggest lawsuit they will ever see. Little Tom Thumb going after the 800lb gorilla. It won't even be funny, it'll be too short.
I'm just as ready as anyone to laugh at Microsoft, and God knows MS deserves a good turn at their own shenanigans, but this is pathetic. MS is going to bury these jokers under so much paperwork that they suffocate and ask for the beheading themselves.
Really, before going after the biggest, most experienced target in the field, it pays to train oneself. I doubt very much that Impulse has enough practice. I think MS is going to crush them like the bug they are.
On another matter, I'm quite glad to see that there are multiple posts about patents that are exactly what I think : patents that do not create product are not worth consideration. One should only be able to go to court about patent infringement if one has a product on the market. If not, it should be considered contempt of court and the fine should be a million bucks and/or a year in jail breaking rocks.
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