[Afrobean]

Originally Posted by Squeek

Wow, chill out.

All you have to do is look in the patent registry to see if a patent exists for your product, or hire a patent lawyer to do it for you. It takes very little time to verify that nothing else exists in the patent registry.

For whatever reason, these companies either aren't trying hard enough to look for patents or aren't even bothering with them, and they're getting sued for it. All you have to do is spend a little time looking, find out if there's a patent, ask the patent owner if you can make something based on the patent, settle for an amount of money to pay them, then go for it. It'll be a lot less than what the courts will fine you for if they find you guilty of patent infringement.

brb filing a patent on "thing made of matter" so everyone will have to pay me money

Some things shouldn't be allowed to be patented. What if they allowed the idea of putting a drink into a container be patented. What if they allowed the basic principle behind chairs to be patented. What if someone owned a patent for "time keeping device to be worn on a person's wrist"?

This is nothing like what happened with DDR and ITG. ITG's gameplay was literally a clone. This relationship between Harmonix's work and Konami's is more like PIU:DDR. If anything, Activision should be suing Harmonix for the guitar portion of the game being exactly the same (although that would be pretty ****ty considering Harmonix created the concept). Simple gameplay of Rock Band is NOTHING like anything Konami has ever done, except for the very basic concept of "simulated instrument game".

The point I'm trying to make is that such a patent shouldn't even be allowed to exist. It's contradictory to the very idea of the rhythm game genre and suggests that anyone creating a instrument-centric video game needs to go to Konami to get permission. That is stupid as hell.