I was once a consultant on a CAD patent case, and talk about mind-bending. I was just there to explain the CAD side of things, but ended up with a great admiration for the lawyers who could figure out what the logic of the patent's wording.
Rachael Taggart alerted me to the blog of Steve Thomas, who is working his way through some of the patents Dassault Systemes holds, and which apply to CATIA.
If nothing else, read his posts to gain an understanding about why obvious ideas get past patent examiners. For example:
Claim 1 is a "computer implemented" method of displaying the view from a point along a trajectory in a digital 3D space with a superimposed graphic indicating orientation. As I said before, this is a flight simulator. Even if this method had not been patented before, I know the flight simulator game on the original Nintendo did all of this.
And
Claim 18 is for "computer executable code stored on a computer readable medium" that displays the trajectory of the viewpoint as the graphical figure superimposed on a 3D scene, and bends it according to viewpoint rotation speed and stretches it according to viewpoint translation speed. So Dassault patented a bendy-twisty arrow.
And
In short, I do not think the substance of this patent would create much trouble for anyone creating a new CAD package. The only thing Dassault has going for it, as far as this patent is concerned, is the ability to pay for a Borg ship full of lawyers to destroy what refuses to be assimilated.
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