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Nintendo sued over 3DS console's 3D technology

good luck with that Tomita.

looks like a really bad case of patent squatting on the surface (will have to dig deeper).

it doesn't look like Immersion vs Sony, in which Immersion were actually a company that specialised in haptics who actually make and sell products based on all their research. i supported Immersion there (and remember, patents are supposed to protect innovative small companies from just having their innovations stolen by big companies), but this looks shady given that Tomita seem to specialise in... gardening supplies?

even so, Nintendo's lawyers are scary good. i doubt we have anything to worry about.
 
(From a very cursory inspection of the patent) I think the only way to ding Nintendo with this patent would be to argue that the 3DS can be used as a 3D mobile communication terminal.

Is there a 3D video chat? If Nintendo were to lose this case (which I think is improbable), Nintendo would just need to release firmware to remove the 3D video chat.
 
Kerrby said:
I hate people who patent full stop, it's why I no longer like Apple.
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It encourages innovation. Your rewarded for ideas, i dont see anything inherently wrong. Trolls that abuse yes, but humans are vile creatures, but for those that arnnt, continue to be creative.
 
Rezbit said:
Patent law would have to be the most boring thing of all time. Is that what it's even called? I dunno, just ugh.

Really long-winded terminology and scumbags seem to be able to manipulate the system a lot.
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I love how everyone always assumes the videogame company is a poor victim and the company making the claim is an evil entity coming to destroy our lovely world.

That's not what real life is like.
 
and now for a terrible and less-than-relevant GIF

LawOrder-PatentLitigation.jpg


go get 'em Howard!!!
 
test_account said:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=ng...ook_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA

Filing date: Mar 20, 2003
Issue date: Aug 26, 2008


What is the difference?


Also, according to Gamasutra.com's article on this, Tomita Technologies claims that 3rd parties do license the tech, but not Nintendo. If other license the tech, maybe there are something to this patent? Shall be interesting to see what happens.
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the important date is the filing date. Anyway, he was a Sony engineer with a few 3D patents that other companies license, seems a bit more then a patent troll

http://patents.justia.com/inventor/SEIJIROTOMITA.html
 
Frankfurt said:
I love how everyone always assumes the videogame company is a poor victim and the company making the claim is an evil entity coming to destroy our lovely world.

That's not what real life is like.
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knee meet jerk. How else is the internet going to respond to things?
 
Gwanatu T said:
Bingo. This better get thrown out. What a bunch of morons. I really hate these people that file vague patents and don't even have products that use these patents. I'm honestly not sure why that is even allowed!
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TheExodu5 said:
Can they enforce the patent when they don't even do anything with it?
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As far as I know, if a judge finds out they aren't actually using the damn patent, then they can be stripped of it.
 
test_account said:
Yeah, it was the thing about that other companies license stuff from their company which made me wonder if this is a bit different than the more standard patent troll.
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not necessarily. some people pay patent trolls rather than fight them in court. if patent trolls never got paid, there wouldn't be patent trolls.

http://www.tomita-software.com/search/index.php?q=3d

it's stuff like that which makes me think tomita are patent trolls. if i find no mention of 3D on their website, how am i going to believe that this is a case of true patent infringement.

and looking at their patent, what specifically does it suggest that hadn't been done before it was filed? it's very vague sounding, and very general sounding... again not like what we saw with immersion where they numerous, incredibly specific patents, in a field in which they specialise.

Tomita may have another website... tomita software could just be a branch of the company. but so far, i see no reason to presume Nintendo's guilt, and i see reasons to presume Tomita's based on what has been unearthed so far.

i'll gladly shift positions based on concrete evidence, and i'm still looking.
 
Kerrby said:
I hate people who patent full stop, it's why I no longer like Apple.
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or MS, Google, Samsung, Nokia, HTC, IMB or others that fine tons of patents annually, I have to presume. Most of which have no chance of seeing the light of day in a piece of tech...but are filed just in case.

must be a weird feeling to hate the makers of all your electronic gadgets.
 
BY2K said:
Didn't we already knew that it was Sharp who made the 3DS' 3D screens?
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Yes, however, many people were questioning whether or not Sharp had the patent for it, and whether or not Sharp held the patent before this company did.
 
firelink said:
3DS uses parallax barrier technology, which was licensed by Sharp in 2002.

http://www.google.com/patents/about/6437915_Parallax_barrier_display_passive.html?id=FnYLAAAAEBAJ

This was before this guy's patent was even filed.

And here: Samsung actually owns the patent for autostereoscopic displays using the parallax barrier technology:

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=khnKAAAAEBAJ
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Interesting!

Might find a use for this at work (IP clerk)

Couple of things to keep in mind.

Filing date = most important. A lot of companies file a provisional with nothing just to get a date.

Never heard of a company 'losing' a patent cause they don't use it. So long as they pay their yearly fee, they're good after it's issued. TRADEMARKS need proof of use.

Depending on the claims and Nintendo's patience and potential loss keeping their lawyers on this and having lost sales, they might just settle.

It's a LOT harder to sit on patents cause it's more expensive. Likely, Tomita had something in the works and they were able to prove their 3D tech idea was different from Samsung's. It doesn't matter if they indeed only sold gardening tools, a judge won't take that into consideration.
 
Krev said:
Even if they're just patent trolls?
The case may not even be legitimate.
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Patent was issued. That means an examiner looked at it and accepted it along with all claims and drawings.

I still don't see how this is 'trolling'. If you get a patent, you get a patent. You can sit on it if you want. It's within your right to do so.

It's up to a judge to determine if this is valid.

Likely this dude thought he could get money by raising an opposition.

I do agree that Nintendo shouldn't have been dragged into this. Should've been Sharp, if anyone.
 
Kuro Madoushi said:
Patent was issued. That means an examiner looked at it and accepted it along with all claims and drawings.

I still don't see how this is 'trolling'. If you get a patent, you get a patent. You can sit on it if you want. It's within your right to do so.

It's up to a judge to determine if this is valid.

Likely this dude thought he could get money by raising an opposition.

I do agree that Nintendo shouldn't have been dragged into this. Should've been Sharp, if anyone.
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I just think it's dumb to hope anyone wins or loses this case if you don't know all the relevant information.
From what I can see though, they definitely shouldn't be suing Nintendo, since they weren't responsible for the possible infringement.
 
I really wish the patent office required that an actual device be produced. This is an example of a guy who obviously made it his full time job to research somewhat vague things to patent so he could make money licensing tech if any of the ideas became widely used by any big companies. He's made 100 patent applications since 2002; that's 11 patents a year for a company that has produced no products.
 
Dreamwriter said:
I really wish the patent office required that an actual device be produced.
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That's a terrible idea. Concepts being stolen and then beaten to market are a significant concern.
 
Krev said:
That's a terrible idea. Concepts being stolen and then beaten to market are a significant concern.
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Yeah, the whole point of patents in the first place is to firms enough time to capitalise on their ideas before someone else beats them to it (in exchange they have to detail their idea in full so when the patent expires everyone is free to use it).

Still this only holds true if other companies are actually infringing on your patent, which in this case, Nintendo is not.
 
Luigiv said:
Yeah, the whole point of patents in the first place is to firms enough time to capitalise on their ideas before someone else beats them to it (in exchange they have to detail their idea in full so when the patent expires everyone is free to use it).
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No, the point of patents used to be that by openly documenting inventions the first inventor gets more publicity (and money) and other inventors don't need to redo all the research and instead license it. Instead it has become a legal implementation prevention and malpractice system serving only dedicated groups of lawyers. That's like the exact opposite of the initial idea.
 
Datschge said:
No, the point of patents used to be that by openly documenting inventions the first inventor gets more publicity (and money) and other inventors don't need to redo all the research and instead license it. Instead it has become a legal implementation prevention and malpractice system serving only dedicated groups of lawyers. That's like the exact opposite of the initial idea.
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thank you.
 
Gamer @ Heart said:
Why sue Nintendo? They are Sharp screens arent they? Nintendo doesnt hold the patent.
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I don't know how these things work, but seems the patent holders can sue whoever they want in the production chain since they can come up with whatever licensing terms they can dream of.

This seems similar to S3 suing Apple for the texture compression technology used on the PowerVR GPUs (PVRTC is basically S3TC with a few additions).
 
Lazy8s said:
Wile PVRTC is block based like S3TC, some of the differences in implementation are fairly fundamental.

http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/docs/PVRTextureCompression.pdf
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But it looks close enough to be considered derivative work. There are also several references to S3TC in the original paper that proposed the format, with the differences being cited as improvements.

The data structure is almost the same: 4x4 blocks which contain two color values and a 4x4 2-bit mask which tells which color each pixel should use (with possibility of interpolating between the two colors). PVRTC additions are basically bilinear interpolation of neighboring blocks (which breaks away the block S3TC look), a lower color precision to fit a 3-bit alpha channel without increasing the filesize and the 2bpp mode.
 
A specific implementation of block truncation coding like S3TC does not grant it domain over the general use of BTC. A much larger scope of graphics algorithms, from texture compressions to image anti-aliasing algorithms and more, would be screwed if that were true.

S3 will lose when the matter is finally resolved, but HTC will have accomplished their goal of positioning their patent portfolio against Apple.

Reconstructing the image/detail from a modulated blending of multiple component signals is taking a fundamentally unique approach. PVRTC neither starts with S3TC nor includes its implementation anywhere in the process.

Simon references S3TC -- and their own prior PVRVQ LUT scheme, among other TC schemes, for that matter -- in his design papers to show where they fundamentally diverge and how that addresses shortcomings of the other approaches.
 
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