I'm interested in patenting SNES cart with MIDI

With my work on the Super Nintendo Tracker and the Onboard MIDI port. I found it advantageous to patent my idea. I believe this is the first time this will be done; that is, placing and interfacing an on-cartridge MIDI PORT with the Super Nintendo console.

I have never filed a patent before. Since this is SNES related after all, I came here first. Do any of you guys here have any pointers or tips or guidance for me?

Thanks in advance,
Michael Bazzinotti

From what I understand, the patent process may be more frustration and costly than it's worth for a project of this scope. If you don't want somebody copying your design, you could always just not publish the schematics. You mentioned in your other post how you were concerned about how people would react to you profiting off of the information that you've learned here. Making money is one thing, but a patent might be a bit much. Also, if you produce the carts yourself, a lot of people would probably be willing to buy it just to have a complete product rather than building it themselves. Just look at the SD2SNES. ikari has released the full schematics, PCB files, source code, basically everything that you would need to build an entire SD2SNES from scratch, but he still sells them because building one is actually a lot of work. Personally, I don't see the point of a patent here.

Thanks for response qwertymodo. Here is some food for thought.

While I may not know about the costs or frustrations of filing a patent, I can confidently say that is probably good practice, even for a project not so wholesomely worthy of a patent. It is good practice, perhaps?; To gain the practice of filing a patent, this early.

Plus having to be sure there's no prior art that invalidates the whole thing.

Good practice? But for what benefit really. That's a pretty large investment and process to go through just for 'good practice'. I wouldn't be surprised if the patent process was more time consuming and certainly more expensive than what you've invested in the project yourself.

The only benefit is that you have grounds to stand on if you'd like to sue someone for stealing your work. It doesn't actually stop them, just gives you a case should you decide that it's worth your time and money to take them to court.

There are plenty of much simpler ways to protect your work if you'd like to keep people from stealing it. Making it so they'd effectively have to create the entire thing from the ground up is probably more than enough deterence if you're really concerned. As for patenting the idea of MIDI on a SNES connector I'm not sure it's really an patentable invention. People should be allowed to create their own completely different implementation of a MIDI port on a SNES connector should they choose too.

I wouldn't bother trying to get a patent just for the sake of getting one and being able to say you have one. Unless it were something you intended to mass produce and sell on a large scale, there isn't much point IMO.

FTFY.

A MIDI serial port on the Game Pak PCB would appear obvious given J-Cart and Midines, and Game Boy Camera beat you to a tracker on a console.

Chinese manufacturers won't care about you having a patent, and they are the only real danger in terms of competition, as they could produce things real cheap, unlike any of potential non-Chinese competitors who would like to clone your project.

I'd also question the whole possibility to patent something that involves Nintendo's hardware. MIDI too, I would guess there are fees to use it in a hardware project, like ones that SD card or MP3 technologies has.

MIDI port on a game system cart in general is certainly not something original that could be patented, has been done before (as tepples ninja'd).

I don't see your point with J-CART. I see your other points. I like it. Does this mean I can relax?

So Midines is not something the developer patented or felt a need to protect? He just made it? I suppose I'll get into contact with him.

I actually cleared this idea when I saw that the NEKO Game Saver for SNES has patent(s). The patent as I remember reading it was worded abstractedly enough to universify the idea.

Through the back & forth here at the forum. I am moving towards concluding and dropping the weight of getting a patent. It seems the idea has been manifested in other areas, that financially and actually how the patent can be used is of no interest to me when not even a prototype is built. I am glad I motioned to ask these questions instead of them lying dormant inside of me.

I will make a motion to ask the creator of midines how he felt in the design process. Or a guide to follow when designing your next biggest project, slash first project that may reach a market.

I am a college undergrad.

Thanks guys for your trustworthy feedback.

When I talk about prohibitive cost and effort, I'm talking potentially tens of thousands of dollars and several years worth of red tape and paperwork. All for relatively very little benefit.

So it sounds like patents are only worth it when you are expecting humongous dollars in return.

I am under the impression that patents are only useful for an idea/implementation that is extremely universal and highly applicable/desired.

For instance, say that tracker console software/hardware as I am designing became a sought after goal, and future designers started implementing the same general design except for different systems. So, had I patented the universal design, does that mean these similar designs fall under my patent; can be sued by me? Is that the point of having a patent. Ensuring you make money off a branch of your universal idea/design?

Then, when I brought this thread up, someone mentioned, The GAmeboy Camera already did the 'tracker on a console' type thing. -- So, what? Are you saying they have a patent for that already? OR, that the prior physical manifestation of something like my idea is enough to prevent my own patent of the idea?

I'm asking all of these questions less because I want a patent, more because I want to understand how it works.

The actual intent wouldn't be suing, it would be licensing, that you would have a patent that other companies would have to license from you in order to incorporate your invention into their product. You would sue if they used it without licensing. The "patent it so we can sue" attitude rose out of patent trolling, where companies just file for (or purchase) as many patents as they possibly can, then go around finding anybody with anything even remotely resembling their patent and suing, with the thought that prohibitive legal fees will lead a lot of their targets to just settle out of court. I would say that the only reason you'd want a patent is if you actually intend to monetize it, either through licensing or otherwise. If you're just looking to protect your work from copying, obfuscate the design, e.g. with programmable hardware and closed source. You probably can't physically protect against someone sufficiently skilled and motivated (though I would think the threat would be fairly low), the question is one of LEGALLY protecting it, and whether it's worth it.

The latter. If someone else invented and published what you claim is your invention, your patent should be rejected for lack of novelty. The application will be sent back to you, and you will be asked to make your claims more specific so as not to cover what already exists. It's called "lack of novelty" or "claims anticipated by prior art".

Similar to novelty is that your invention must not be the most obvious solution to the problem. This is where the J-Cart comes in. A MIDI controller is a user input device, just as a Sega Genesis controller is an input device. A user input device connector on a game cartridge is in the prior art (as the J-Cart), and merely specializing this to MIDI would likely be obvious.

How universal does it get? When you get that abstract, sounds like someone (the father of consoles) could make money off Microsoft and any console company that exists.

So you're telling me that the first guy who puts an input device on a cartridge could/may have filed a patent and therefore has some sort of involvement with anyone else selling some sort of input device connected to a cartridge? regardless of the nature? (for instance I consider MIDI input of different nature from non-musical related input). However, in actual reality, this difference that I see and others may acknowledge, may in fact be coupled into the central idea of 'input device on a cartridge' as far as patent is concerned?!

I'm sensing you're probably pretty young, and maybe? not based in the United States?

Absolutely there were/still are lawsuits and nasty lawyer tactics regarding the generic concepts of "video game" and "controller".

This is all fascinating history if you would ever want to go out and search for it. Fortunately for you, a lot of this stuff you're involved with was settled quite a while ago.

Check out this case in which "Tactile feedback man-machine interface device" went to court, and Sony lost big time (and Microsoft settled).

It's kind of why you'll experience this general aversion to patents. They're mostly bad news, and not at all fun to talk about on hobbyist websites. Although, occasionally, the patents do describe the internal workings of something that would be otherwise unrealistic to reverse engineer.

Patenting process involves minimally 5 figure sums and can also reach 6 figures. It is not worthwhile unless you are going to make big time money off the thing...

Patents expire. Patents on the NES/Famicom expired awhile ago making clones no longer a gray area. Anyway, Patents are supposed to exist to protect the inventors of new products so that they can sell whatever it is for a period of time without others just copying it. The reason being, why invest the time and money to invent anything new if someone else is just going to steal it and produce your product? You're talking about a product that would be unprofitable for anyone to copy. That's protection enough.

The EverDrive 64 Flash cartridge was copied by the chinese. However, only the older version of it. The newer version was better protected against copying. This is the sort of thing to do to prevent copying, not a patent and legal options that you can't afford. It's different for a large company ofcourse. The EverDrive 64 targets a fairly small market, but it's still larger than a SNES MIDI cartridge. The other thing is people *usually* respect homebrew community people and don't rip them off.

I think if your are confident with your invention, patent it. The innovative ideas or design are highly required and appreciated. You can restrict others from making or copying your invention. Patents are meant to simply promote innovation and creativity by motivating the timely disclosure of how to make and use different inventions and also by protecting a number of investments carried out to commercialize these inventions.

I don't think it would even be patentable, hardware-wise it's really simple. I'm no patent lawyer, but I don't think it's necessarily innovative just because it's on SNES. It's just using MIDI to do what MIDI was designed to do.. That being said, it would be cool to see an SNES MIDI cartridge, I hope your project succeeds.

Best protection I'd recommend would be to require a read-protected MCU or similar hardware. I'm sure you'd want a UART anyways.