[svlug] Mr Obvious?

[Peter Ridge]

ian maclure on 04/08/2004 04:13 PM wrote:
> There's some other stuff about file structures et al but it all boils
> down to something that should not have been considered for more than two
> seconds before denying the patent.
> 
> Once you know what the data is, a storage schema should follow nearly
> by inspection.

As a followup to my previous post, here's an article about obviousness 
of inventions:

http://www.webpatent.com/news/news12_99.htm

After a skim through the claims and summary of MS's invention, the only 
somewhat unique thing I saw was that one game can't access the data of 
another. The rest seemed pretty obvious to one "ordinary in the skill in 
the art". After all, consoles already store game data on memory 
cartridges and PCs already store game data on hard disks (with 
descriptive names, date/time, screenshots, etc.). If anyone (Sony, 
Nintendo, etc.) were to put a hard disk in their console, they'd have to 
give it a file system too.

Merely moving the hard disk from the PC into the console and giving it a 
file system doesn't show me sufficient non-obviousness, novelty or 
utility to be patentable--especially since the Xbox is just a PC in 
Playstation clothing.

To quote from paragraph 6 of the aforementioned article, I would say 
that the inventors haven't "taken an 'inventive' step--a step beyond the 
practice of good engineering or commonsense design--in conceiving the 
invention." The following approaches also from the same paragraph, 
illustrate further:

"changing (simply scaling up or down) a product's size without solving a 
technical problem in doing so": The Xbox is a shrunken PC (Intel CPU, 
nVidia graphics processor, hard disk, Windows kernel). Storing data for 
multiple games was already done on the PC.

"making a product portable, integral, or separable": In other words, 
integrating a hard drive in a game console.

"optimizing a product within ranges known in the prior art": The PC, as 
used for playing games, should be prior art in this context and, apart 
from the isolation of game data on a per-title basis, has been storing 
game data in a fashion similar to this invention.

-- 
Peter