Magnavox owned patents for video games played on a television screen.Leo wrote:In the US in the early 1980s there was a video game company named Oddessy. I read they made most of their money by suing other companies claiming they had a copyright on video games in general. Strange.Cardoso wrote:Rambus is a patent buying company, then sues every other company that remotely uses some method/feature mentioned in the patents.
The company has engineers but they never came up with a good product.
The initial P4 RDRAM fiasco had to be solved/finished by Intel engineers. Later they abandoned RDRAM and moved to DDR.
Rambus is more like e patent fighting company than any other thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey#Lawsuits
The root of the conflict was a pair of patents by Baer -- one which described how the Odyssey showed player-controlled objects, or dots, on a video monitor and described a number of games that could be played with the system, and an earlier one that went into detail about how the Odyssey used that system to have two dots collide with each other and have one bounce off, specifically using a game of ping pong as an example.
The judge ruled that Baer's more general patent for the Odyssey constituted "the pioneering patent of the video game art", and held the defendants' games as infringing the patents. Atari settled early on in the court case with Magnavox, and in return were granted a license in exchange for US$1.5 million and access granted to Magnavox to all technology produced by Atari from June 1976 to June 1977, while the other defendants paid higher penalties.
And it seems Atari would never have been founded and Pong never been created without the Odyssey having been there to inspire Atari's founder.Magnavox won more than US$100 million in the various patent lawsuits and settlements involving the Odyssey related patents. In addition, they had a large number of licensees of patents, with over one hundred already by the mid 1970s.
The father of video games