More patents...

[Parksy]

Agree with you Darren, how can you patent something that clearly they have thought of in principle but not actually got it working? How can you patent something that you can't actually show as a working product?

Okay I'm off to file for the patent on flying cars. Have a picture of the back to the future car and the one from Bladerunner as concept art

 

[Steve Hancock]

My little sister had a little toy chick that tweeted when you sat it on your hand. It worked by your hand completing a circuit between to contacts on the bottom of the toy. It sounded to me like they are patenting a system similar to this. Except your marker won't just sit there and tweet, cute as that might be.

If this is workable, on this occasion fair play to them. If it works it is a good idea, and they should benefit from it.

It also occurred to me that it could be a publicity thing. SP release a patent, everyone on the net kicks up a fuss. And they are happy because any publicity is good publicity.

Of course they could be getting it through as a Trojan horse, with plans to expand their patent to cover all uses of a trigger in paintball markers.

On a more general note, if someone has a patent does that stop people from owning or building themself something covered by a patent, or does it just stop companys selling?

 

[QuackingPlums]

Originally posted by Parksy
Agree with you Darren, how can you patent something that clearly they have thought of in principle but not actually got it working?

One often missed use (or should that be misuse? ) of patents is that if you've come up with an idea and proved that it was your idea (either by patenting it or publishing it in a formal way) then no matter how much later someone else actually develops that idea, they can no longer patent it.

This is what happened to James Dyson and his (in)famous vacuum cleaners - there are like some 200 patents on his first model (and more with each new one) but bits of it he couldn't patent, despite being the first company to actually build one, because ages ago someone said something like "wouldn't it be great if vacuum cleaners had hoses" in Vacuum Cleaners Weekly...

Anyway, on the subject of touch-sensitive triggers - anybody seen those peizo-electric ones from Dynamix yet? With the right combination of amplification and filtering I'm sure u could get a peizo-crystal to be near touch sensitive, and it wouldn't suffer from that characteristic of most other triggers that require you to fully release it between each pull...

 

[Hotpoint]

Originally posted by Gadget
Hehehe, I can see it now - game starts and everyone steams up the field shouting "Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang!"

If a judge catches you saying Taka Taka Taka instead you get pulled for having burst fire

 

[QuackingPlums]

What happens if you have a stammer?

 

[Steve Hancock]

We all know about trigger bounce.

But what about trigger echo, where the sound of the marker firing activates the trigger.