谈创新效率：美国专利局花8年完成一项云游戏专利审批

Cloud gaming patent arrives--after 8 years

Rick Merritt

A startup has been awarded what it claims is a broad patent on its new style of online gaming. The U.S. patent office took eight years to review and grant OnLive's patent, typical of the kind of delay that is undermining innovation, said the startup's chief executive.

U.S. Patent #7,849,491 describes a technique for delivering fast-action video games running on remote servers to a wired or wireless thin-client device. OnLive announced its cloud-based gaming service based on the approach in March, and it is now available on a range of systems including PCs, Macs and the company's own so-called micro-console.

The startup's crown jewel is a rapid compression technology capable of transporting packet data up to a thousand miles with latency of less than 80 milliseconds. OnLive has designed encoding and decoding ASICs for its approach that are used in the company's custom-designed network servers and microconsoles.

The technology aims to shift videogames away from relatively expensive consoles and PCs, making it a network service. "We recognized the transformational effect this would have on the videogame industry," said Steve Perlman, OnLive chief executive and a serial entrepreneur.

"Eight years would be too long to wait for a key patent if this was not such a fundamentally new concept," said Perlman. "For most startups, if it took this long to get a key patent, they could not have gotten funding or gotten a product out in time," he said.

A generation ago, inventors would get a patent to get funding so they could develop a product. Given the historic backlog at the patent office, that's no longer possible and innovation is suffering, said Perlman.

"It's depressing when I talk to young engineers coming out of college about creating a new company," said Perlman, an inventor with 104 patents who is outspoken on the topic of patent reform.

"They can't expect a patent to issue in time to get funding, so they have to think of ideas that are not significant enough to need a patent," he said. "That means we are not seeking fundamental ideas anymore, and that’s not good for the industry or the economy," he added.

OnLive's patent was not even examined until five years after it was submitted, Perlman said.

The U.S. patent office had a backlog of about 750,000 applications at the start of 2010. The agency's new director David Kappos, former head of IBM's intellectual property department, said he hopes to pare that down to less than 700,000 by the end of the year.

Several individuals and groups have called for boosting funding for the agency to help it hire and retain more examiners to work off the backlog. The agency has been trying to hire and train as many as 1,000 examiners a year for the last several years, but loses almost a third of its examiners each year.

Kappos has "made some changes and tried to work in the cramped budget he has, but the turnover rate there is incredible," said Perlman.

Sources suggest Lamar Smith (R., Tx.) in the U.S. House of Representatives will try to bring up the topic of patent reform in the next legislative session. The draft reform has been controversial and is primarily focused on streamlining issues in patent litigation.

"It's hard to imagine making any headway until they dig out of this backlog," said Perlman.

Hundreds of patents pending

OnLive has filled the global patent pipeline with a portfolio of hundreds of applications with thousands of claims for its cloud-based gaming techniques. Some are filed under the names of other companies that are part of Perlman's Reardon Labs, an incubator for startups.

"This is the largest portfolio of patents assembled around one technology," Perlman said. "We have a giant spreadsheet to keep track of them all," he said.

Perlman would not comment on any plans to assert the patents. He also declined to comment on the number of subscribers for the OnLive service, however he did say it is experiencing rapid growth and has hosted millions of sessions to date.

The service uses three data centers in the U.S. and is working with partners on beta trials in Asia and Europe. It started as a wired-only service for PCs and Macs, and now supports Wi-Fi links.

OnLive can also be used via some TVs, and games can be viewed on Apple iPads. A version of the service for Google Android systems is in beta testing. An OnLive application was recently ranked as the seventh most popular app for iPads in the U.S.

TVs and Blu-ray players will be available in 2011 that build in hardware compression decoders to handle OnLive sessions, Perlman said.

Most fast-action video games do not yet support the touch interfaces used on tablets and smartphones, but that is changing, Perlman said.

"Games take three to four years to develop, so when today's games were started developers never imagined them being played with touchpads on ARM-based devices—they were written for keyboards and joysticks," he said.