Prior Art Search to Invalidate Patent
The following appeared in the last IGDA newsletter; I thought maybe some of our engineers who regular look at the blog might be able to help. This case might very well be an important event in IP ownership.
There is an ongoing patent litigation case in the Eastern District of Texas of interest to all developers because of how broadly the Plaintiff appears to want to apply the claims of the patent. In this case, American Video Graphics, L.P. ("Plaintiff") has sued sixteen game publishers, alleging that these defendants infringe AVG's U.S. Patent No. 4,734,690, "Method and Apparatus for Spherical Panning." See Jim Charne's commentary in this month's Famous Last Words:
http://www.igda.org/columns/lastwords/lastwords_Mar05.php
Plaintiff has identified over 1000 accused games, which Plaintiff alleges infringe their '690 patent. The '690 patent abstract states: "A graphics display terminal performs a pan operation with respect to a view motion center to effectuate spherical panning, thereby providing perspective and non-perspective views. Three dimensional instructions stored in terminal memory are re-transformed in accordance with a panned direction..." Full patent details available at the USPTO:
http://tinyurl.com/62sjj
More specifically, we are looking for prior art (textbooks, references,articles, or other publications) with a date of publication of before July 23, 1983 which would invalidate the '690 patent. This art must cover the claims of the patent, including a method and system which defines a "first" and a "second three-dimensional coordinate modeling space"; with a "viewing space being movable at a selected radial distance around a selected reference point in the modeling space;" and effects a "transform of the coordinates of the object to the viewing space and to a two-dimensional coordinate screen space." Further, ideally the prior art would also provide a method whereby the user can change the pitch, yaw or roll of the viewing space, and also specify a radial distance at which the object may be viewed.
If you know of any such prior art, please contact the IGDA's IP Rights
Committee at ipr@igda.org as soon as possible.
http://www.igda.org/committees/ipr.php
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August 30, 2006 8:30 PM