Subject: Re: Nintendo glove and VPL

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 92 10:23:50 -0800

Is there something fundamentally wrong with our patent system?
I'd like to patent the idea of using electrically excited heating
elements to cook food!
How can you patent such a general concept as using a glove for
interaction with a computer? (I'm obviously not a lawyer)

Anyway, I recently called VPL to ask about the possibility of using
an HC11 and a PowerGlove to emulate a VPL DataGlove.  I spoke to Ann
Lasko-Harvill.  She "assured" me that, although they own very generalized
patents involving glove technology, that as long as I didn't attempt
to market the product, there would be no problem.

I am going to write them a letter to try to clarify this a little.
Would distributing the code be an infringement of their rights?
How could I legitimately obtain the communications protocol between
a DataGlove and a host.  Could that protocol be copyrighted?

I'll post more, when I figure this out.

  -Jim

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From: Chris Shaw <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 1992 15:52:59 -0700

> to market the product, there would be no problem.

This is a fundamental part of patent law. You can do anything you like with
patented technology in the privacy of your own home. Patent law protects the 
*marketing* of intellectual property, and specifically allows people to 
freely experiment with patented stuff.

I believe the basic problems with the VPL patent are that it is too late,
too obvious, and too closely related to NASA contracts. 

Most of the work done with hand representation is from 1986 or before, 
some of it under contract to NASA. My guess is that the patent office
didn't do enough of a background search, probably overlooking goniometric
methods in common use. In other words, the prior are may lie in non-computer
areas.

I believe the VPL/AGE deal was struck because AGE had too close a 
relationship with VPL for anyone to seriously believe that AGE came
up with the Power Glove all by themselves.

-- 
Chris Shaw               University of Alberta
[email-masked]    CatchPhrase: Bogus as HELL !

---

From: Joan Eslinger <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 92 16:12:21 PST

*  Date:    Fri, 24 Jan 92 15:52:59 MST
*  To:      [email-masked]
*  From:    Chris Shaw <[email-masked]>
*  Subject: Re: Nintendo glove and VPL
*  
*  This is a fundamental part of patent law. You can do anything you like with
*  patented technology in the privacy of your own home. Patent law protects the 
*  *marketing* of intellectual property, and specifically allows people to 
*  freely experiment with patented stuff.
*  
*  Chris Shaw               University of Alberta
*  [email-masked]    CatchPhrase: Bogus as HELL !

I was surprised myself to learn that apparently this is not quite the
case. The subject came up recently in comp.patents or some similar
group. As I understood one posting, you are allowed some limited use of
independently-developed patented technology in your own home, but you
are not, for example, allowed to use it to develop the ideas further and
then sell those extensions, even though the extensions themselves don't
infringe on the original patent. I'm sure it's even worse than that.

Wombat
[email-masked]

---

From: John Wroclawski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 92 19:50:14 -0500

From: [email-masked]
   Date: Fri, 24 Jan 92 10:23:50 -0800

Well, I think so. As patents go, this one's not all that out of line
in what it claims relative to the technology. (No judgement implied
about whether VPL was actually the first to develop this technology,
and whether this patent will stand up in court. I'm sure that if
there's money to be made others with prior claims will show up...)

There's little doubt that the first person to have come up with this
could have, if they had wanted to. You need three things to get a
patent; novelty, unobviousness, and usefulness. Cooking food with
electricity is certainly useful. It was, at some point, certainly a
new idea. So the only question is, was it, at that time, an obvious
thing to do?  Depends. If people had been using electric heat for any
number of other purposes before your idea, perhaps it was. In that
case, you still might have been able to patent the idea of using a
flat, insulated heating coil strong enough to support a pot. Or the
idea of using a waterproof, imersible heating coil to boil water for
tea. The scope of a patent is limited by the prior art. Patents in new
fields like VR are often, if "well" written, remarkably broad. One
reason you don't notice this more is that there aren't all that many
completely new fields.

As things go, that's quite a specific concept, actually.

Well, yup. The patent laws specifically allow use of patented
technology for research and study purposes - essentially, you are
always allowed to build one of something to see how it works, and
whether you can improve it. 

They might attempt to claim that you are guilty of contributory
infringement - loosely defined, encouraging someone else to infringe
on their patent. RSA threatened to sue someone who was distributing a
public domain version of public key encryption code. On the other hand
they might not, since in the hands of a clever person things like that
tend to lead to really bad publicity, and they may decide that people
who want to use your public-domain code aren't the ones who would have
bought $58,000 MicroCosm systems if your code didn't exist.