MTV Games finds Konami's Rock Band lawsuit 'surprising'

They're definitely going to have a hard time with this because of the long wait. Due to the enormous success that was Guitar Hero II (not to mention Guitar Hero I), Konami has gone a long time not protecting their patent in the face of obvious infringement. I don't know what the window is, but for them to now go after MTV with Rock Band, which is the 3rd generation of these games stateside, the judge is going to ask why they didn't bring suit against the previous games. It would be different if they were minor hits, but everyone in the games industry (and many outside of it) have known about the music genre revolution for some time. Failure to defend your patent can mean implied forfeiture.

That would be incorrect since Konami was paid for the Guitar Hero games to use their patents. Rock Band gets the lawsuit because they chose not to pay. I can assure you that no matter what MTV says, they are not surprised.

@aristokrat
The GH franchise has a license from Konami to use their patent. However RB does not. But Konami did take their sweet ass time

MTV has actually owned the patent pertaining to a game featuring drums since I believe 1998 for Drumscape and not Konami. The lawsuit is just over the music game and guitar aspect which are the only patents Konami holds.

Here is my "sarce"

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16014

How does Donkey Konga fit into all this?

Noshino, Rigopolous and others have been on record for a while saying that they have been wanting to produce instrument-based music games for a while.

They had been designing a turntable based game long before Guitar Hero came along.

They had already developed Amplitude and Frequency, which cover every element of the patent except for the instrument.

If Harmonix is able to produce a single design document showing that they had thought about producing an instrument-based game before 2003 (and I strongly suspect they can), you know what that's called?

Prior Art.

And if there's prior art, then it doesn't matter whether Harmonix was aware of the patent when they developed Rock Band, because the patent is worthless.

I doubt they could, since Rob Kay from Harmonix mentioned that even the idea of Guitar Hero was from the guys at RedOctane

Excerpt from Iain Simons' book, Inside Game Design

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2801/book_excerpt_inside_game_design_.php

"How did [the Guitar Hero] project concept emerge?

RedOctane had been talking to Harmonix for a while. It was a rental company and then they made dance mats for DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]. It ended up selling a bundle of these dance mats and wanted to progress that side of its business. The company was interested in making a guitar game as they'd seen Guitar Freaks, which Konami had done. So they came to Harmonix with the request, "will you make us a great guitar game for our new piece of guitar hardware?" "

Yup. Like I said, they had already done design work on a turntable based game when Red Octane approached them about the Guitar Hero concept.

A turntable is an instrument, so if they can show that they thought about this in 2002 or earlier that's prior art.

I thought that was what they were going for...?

"They feel that they are entitled to profit from the things Harmonix does, that they can't do themselves."

Replace "Harmonix" with "developers" and you've got pretty much every games publisher out there.

*And you're describing...

Wow, my sentences don't make any sense tonight...I need some sleep lol.

Agreed.

Hey, Neversoft are NOT a bunch of hacks.

They made some of the best skating games ever, but that may be because they made some of the only skating games ever.

It doesn't mean that they can make a completely unrelated game; I'm good at writing but that doesn't make me a good choice for composing an album.

*isn't surprised either

I spent them taking a whiz. =(

As I understand it, MTV, for all intents and purposes stole the idea of DrumMania beat Konami to the arcade market, and by proxy the home market, thus no DrumMania. I assume this expands into other areas, which is why we never got any of the instrument based Bemani games, just Beatmania and DDR. It would also be a shame if this was the reason why we never got another Taiko Drum Master.

You know, you have a point... one which has been made many times and I'm sure as shit positive another 30 idiots will make the same point, but here is my point. It's quite pointy.

If the rhythm game industry MUST wait for Konami to make the move every Bemani fan believes they are entitled to, America may see Guitar Freaks SOMETIME in 2031. You people forget, DDR wasn't a hit because Konami worked hard to make it so. DDR hit big despite Konami's efforts. For example, when the first machines hit a few arcades locally, Konami basically sent out cease and desist letters claiming music licenses and all that jazz. By the time third mix dropped, Konami was powerless to stop it and instead threatened to sue tournaments which recorded the gameplay screens claiming copyright protection. When this failed, Konami, reluctantly, dropped a halfassed effort on Playstation and discovered... holy shit, this thing they were fighting was popular and they immediately launched a few more mixes (Disney race and Konamix).

Now look at Beatmania, the longest running of the entire Bemani franchise, and how 14th Mix Gold is the first mix EVER to be site tested in the US... or how crappy the PS2 port was.

Basically, if we WERE waiting for Konami to get their ducks in a row, nothing would ever happen, we wouldn't have seen this genre take off, much less become over saturated... but hey, at least the Konami loyalists could claim solidarity in their support and ultimately glad they could whip these games out at anime conventions with "real music" instead of the "gross" American stuff...

no. Konami and everyone else are in the game biz for the love. and you'll never convince me otherwise.

People here are just defending Harmonix because of Rock Band, but they seem to forget that Viacom, the parent company, has a worse suing record than that of Konami...

After all, the nickname of Dr. Evil for Mr Redstone and the bad fame of the Viacom lawyers is for a reason...

You guys are defending the company that wants Google to share all of the personal information from Youtube users? Nice...

Someone call my name?

They're working on one.