Thing is, these people will make a vauge patent and sit on it for years, only to unleash it when they can make money. This one should have been thrown out immediately. It's been 6 years and he's NOW sueing over patent infringment. Anyone with half a brain knows this puppy doesn't fly.

Civil court is broken as hell and no one wants to fix it....

I'm too lazy to look at the patents. Can anyone tell me what they cover? The controllers don't really seem all that different from what existed from decades ago except adding more sticks and buttons. Can you really patent adding more sticks and buttons?

I agree. We need to switch to a loser pays system. This guy should be thrown out on his ear for this.

I only browsed through some of the patents quickly. They are not vague, they are in fact very detailed. Patents are not always the idea, but sometimes the method. He may have found a cheaper way to accomplish the same thing. I'm not saying thats the case, but it could be. If I remember correctly, an item on the market for at least one year cannot be patented.

I only scanned a couple, but one patent starts off by describing a controller held in two hands. This controller has on the left side a group of dependent buttons (not stated in the patent, but I interpret that as a d-pad), while the right side as multiple independent buttons (which I interpret as having a a,b,x,y set of buttons).

Some parts of other patents describe essentially a TV remote in terms of functionality, but with the equivilent of bluetooth or some sort of Wifi.

Overall, (and I've said this before) all of these patents should never have been accepted in the first place, or voided due to prior art.

Goody, now those rednecks at Anascape can all get their own Flowbees to cut their mullets.

Can we PLEASE give Texas back to Mexico?? =D

hell no, i actually live there.

anyway, yays for my first news posting ever getting some attention :)

EDIT: Actually, Anascape isn't located in Texas, they are located in Carson City, NV.

oh, here is a picture from the two handed controller I described. Notice the extremem amount of copy from the N64 controller?

LOL we'll keep San Antonio, ok? ;)
And congrats on the news post =D

I'm actually of the opinion that a patent should be (very) expensive to file (potentially in the $10,000 range) and this fee should be used to investigate whether similar devices already exist, whether a similar patent already exists, and if the patent is specific enough; if the patent is rejected it will come with a series of annotations for the reasons it was rejected and (if these problems are corrected) the patent can be refiled for a similar expensive fee.

This might not seem (entirely) fair for the "Little Guy" but I suspect that they would not be (nearly) as impacted as the large corporations who try to patent everything, or the patent troll who creates the most vague patent and uses lawsuits to generate revenue for their company.