Re: Patent concerns

["Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa redhat com>]

On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 21:50 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Matthew Miller wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 02:46:02PM -0500, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> >> Due to patent concerns, we won't be able to include any games in Fedora
> >> which meet the following criteria:
> >> A game where "targets" move across the screen to a predetermined point
> >> or line, where the player hits a button/key/mouse click as the target(s)
> >> crosses that point or line, and gets points.
> > 
> > Seriously? I wrote an AppleBasic game in fourth grade (1984) that did that.
> > 
> 
> I hear you, some smartass behind DDR though so game mechanics can't be 
> copyrighted, lets patent them.
> 
> Cheesh.
> 
> Maybe its an idea to petition pubpat: http://www.pubpat.org/ to fight this? I 
> know they have much bigger (and much more important) fish to catch, but this 
> seems trivially easy to overthrow.

If you're motivated to find the prior art, feel free.

Unfortunately, I have several million other things on my todo list, and
I'm not going to add "hunt down prior art to invalidate video game
patents held by mega-corps" to that list anytime soon.

~spot