THE CURRENT STATE OF V:TES - November 2015

Ashur wrote:

BenPeal wrote:

And before any of you get ideas about how Wizards' patents have expired, please read this:

www.uspto.gov/patents-maintaining-patent/maintain-your-patent

My idea is that is has expired, because I´ve used this fancy tool to calculate it:
www.uspto.gov/patent/laws-and-regulations/patent-term-calculator
You cannot pay to maintain a patent beyond 20 years: "Maintenance fees are due three times during the life of a patent, and may be paid without surcharge at 3 to 3.5 years, 7 to 7.5 years, and 11 to 11.5 years after the date of issue."

Looking at the packaging for Lords of the Night, the patent owned by Wizards of the Coast and licensed by White Wolf Game Studio/CCP is RE37,957:

Link to patent RE37957

It was filed on June 29, 1999 and issued on January 7, 2003. Given a 20 year patent term, it will not expire until January 7, 2023.

Ashur wrote:

BenPeal wrote:

It was filed on June 29, 1999 and issued on January 7, 2003. Given a 20 year patent term, it will not expire until January 7, 2023.

Do you mean there is a patent on every single VTES-set that extends the 1994-patent?

Wizards owns (as far as I've been able to search in the US Patent Office database) only two trading card game patents:

5662332

RE37957

5662332 was filed October 17, 1995. It has an issue date of September 2, 1997.

RE37957 was filed June 29, 1999. It has an issue date of January 7, 2003.

Ah, but from 1995 and onward, the term of the patent (20 years) is based on the date of filing, not the date of issuance. 1994 and prior, the term of the patent (17 years, and this gets important later) was based on the date of issuance, not filing.

RE37597 mentions that it is a re-issue of 5662332. Looking up what a re-issue is...oh, interesting:

www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1401.html

"Whenever any patent is, through error, deemed wholly or partly inoperative or invalid, by reason of a defective specification or drawing, or by reason of the patentee claiming more or less than he had a right to claim in the patent, the Director shall, on the surrender of such patent and the payment of the fee required by law, reissue the patent for the invention disclosed in the original patent, and in accordance with a new and amended application, for the unexpired part of the term of the original patent. No new matter shall be introduced into the application for reissue."

So RE37597 is, in effect, a corrected version of 5662332, not with an extended term, but with the original term - October 17, 1995 through October 17, 2015. (!!!!!)

Both of these patents refer to - and are considered divisions of - the 1994 patent _application_ 263447 which was filed on Jun 22, 1994 but was never issued a patent number. This is probably where people get the 1994 date from. A division or continuation is explained here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisional_patent_application
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application

So I think what Garfield and Wizards did was originally file in 1994, but waited for the new patent laws to take effect in 1995 so they'd get the benefit of a 20-year term instead of a 17-year term, using the division/continuation rules or something.

But the upshot of all of this is that RE37597 expires at the same time as 5662332 (which I think was forfeited anyway as a result of the re-issuance). That expiration date appears to have been October 17, 2015.

Patent-knowledgeable people out there: is all of this correct? I can't help but think we're missing something critical. Does this mean what we hope it means?

Do the artists still retain rights on art?
Card names and symbols are probably IP that can get us sued, but full-bleed cards that have an image on one sideand a green or brown close but not identical to style on the reverse may have always been a loophole.

Of course, this matters more if we cant get anything rolling with Paradox, and they are aware of the games existance if nothing else.

Im not a patent lawyer, but from the sounds of things we should find one and buy them a few drinks.....

ReverendRevolver wrote:

Do the artists still retain rights on art?
Card names and symbols are probably IP that can get us sued, but full-bleed cards that have an image on one sideand a green or brown close but not identical to style on the reverse may have always been a loophole.

You're blurring a few different things here. Moving to full bleed probably isn't really a useful loophole in the grand scheme of things - design rights law isn't usually all that useful, unless you're huge in your field and it's something quite distinctive. Plonking a few icons a picture and some text on a card is much more utilitarian, and we can probably point at dozens of games that have done more or less the same thing, before and since. Not just CCGs - think board games, or a war game with a picture of a tank with its stats and special ability. The issue is still then potentially with the individual elements, like icons etc.

Whether artists retain any IP rights over their work will depend on the contract they signed with Wizards or White Wolf/CCP. That could vary from artist to artist, or over time. Some may have been doing work on a contract under which whichever-company-it-was took ownership of the copyright. Others may have granted a perpetual licence to whichever-company-it-was, but retained the right to use it for other uses. White Wolf may have benefited from cross-over with existing WoD-ish artists they had contracts with.

And the problem is, more or less anything can "get you sued". Even if you can win a case because the other side are being idiots about nothing, you can still run up huge costs - lawyer fees, court fees, cost of discovery, amount of time taken to defend it, any bad publicity it might generate - and even if you can get the direct monetary costs back in the long term, in the short term it can cripple your cash flow if one of the big boys wants to yank your chain.

ReverendRevolver wrote:

Im not a patent lawyer, but from the sounds of things we should find one and buy them a few drinks.....

The most important thing to understand is that this doesn't all come under the umbrella of just "patents", or just "copyright", or just "trademarks" etc. There are multiple distinct areas of intellectual property law at play, which work subtly (and not so subtly) differently from each other.