About Crazy Taxi:

We've already seen the danger of these patents. Sega owns patent no. 6,200,138, which is entitled "Game display method, moving direction indicating method, game apparatus and drive simulating apparatus." What this means is that Sega has a lock on the idea of driving a car around a city with an arrow pointing towards the next destination; it's a patent on Crazy Taxi, more or less.

Is this what the lawsuit is about?

Thanks,

Josheir

AFAIK, design elements have not yet drawn the interest of patent trolls. Games borrow design elements from each other all the time. So you should be ok.

Alpheus, when hodgman writes on these lawsuits and one is probably about the mechanics of a moving directional arrow this is not a design element, really because it has mechanical useage?

Would you please mention some other design elements so that I am on the right page?

Thank you so much,

Josheir

Patents are tricky in that they must match all the claims. Any deviance on even a single claim is enough to usually make it different. Of course there is still the cost of litigation that would bankrupt a hobby developer, but that is enough that a good lawyer could address it long before it reaches that point.

The best answer is always that you should make your own stuff, create your own designs, and not try to leverage other people's stuff. Those other people probably won't like it and it may come back to haunt you.

As for the trolls, they're out there planting land mines. There is little you can do about them unless you have millions of dollars for legal teams. The trolls are unlikely to show up until after you are large enough to extract several tens of thousands of dollars from. Smaller than that and you won't have enough money for it to be worth their costs. Larger than that and you might have the resources to fight.