Maya Patents

#1

I know Alias has patented parts of the technology they used in Maya - I’ve seen HCI papers mentioning that marking menus are patented and my book on programming Maya tells me that the dependancy graph is patented as well. What else? Is there a public list of Maya features that are patented? The reason I’m asking is that I’m thinking about implementing one or the other of Maya’s features as 3rd party plugin for other applications, and I don’t want to run into any legal trouble.

#2

just checking that you haven´t missed the patents list on the alias site, though they only seem to show “selected” patents

alias patents

jens

#3

Sadly, there isn’t any easy way to get a list of patents of a company easily and that’s certainly one of the problems with patents, as you can easily end up infringing one and not know it until the lawsuit is at your door.
For the EU, you are lucky in that patents on algorithms are traditionally known not to be enforcable (albeit there is big pressure on the EU to change that).
For the US, a good place to start is:
http://www.uspto.gov/
You can search for issued patents and published applications. Note that not all patent applications end up being published (which makes it quite hard to contest them, before they become patents).
Patents have an inventor, but the Assignee Name is usually a company. Another problem with patents is that in these days of big corporations, application for patents may end up being to the name of a parent company instead of the company you think it should be. For example, in the case of Alias, you will likely not find a single patent under their name, but instead find most or all of their patents assigned to their parent company (Silicon Graphics). This makes it even harder to know who the patent belongs to, specially once mergers or sales occur, as was the case of Alias recently.
Patents also tend to be written in a legal language that makes them harder to read and interpret.
The best answer is that if you are really serious about what you are doing, you should try to consult a patent lawyer (ideally, one that is familiar with the countries you will be selling your product in).

#4

The worst part is that if a court determines that you are aware of the patent you’re infringing, you can be held liable for triple damages. So a lot of people make an effort not to read up on the competition’s patents, to avoid this exposure.

#5

i think software patents are terrible. i wonder if the alias patent (for the dependency graph) is really unique, or if a parameter browser (which is all the dependency graph really is) is patentable. vomit. (just my 2 cents)

#6

Thanks for your help so far, though the feature I’m interested (Set Driven Keys) isn’t listed on their patents list.

#7

i might be wrong, but i´ve seen similar things to set driven key in most high-end applications, check the bottom of this page for example
xsi link parameter
i haven´t really used set driven key, so i don´t know how specific it is to maya though, but the “feature” seems to be so widely spread it couldn´t be patented… as long as you don´t copy alias a little too exact :slight_smile:

jens.

#8

Yes, this looks similar to what Set Driven Key is (or what I think it is - I’m no Maya Guru either). In general, the idea of using values other than time as input parameter for keyframes is not an ultimtely far-out idea, but you never know, considering what you can patent these days…

#9

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