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Falcon Chess 100. Falcon Chess played on an expanded board of a 100 squares with special Pawn rules. (12x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Robert Fischer wrote on Mon, Jan 17, 2005 12:10 AM UTC:Poor ★

'(FC patent claims cover all 453,600 initial positions including these two.)' _________________________________ False. I read your entire patent text. It does not say that. What the USPTO obviously approved was your single 'preferred embodiment' which you described with sufficient detail and clarity. Although they allowed your extremely long statement (including a mixture of verbose, vague and abstract rambling) to remain verbatim, you did NOT clearly and explicitly claim all 453,600 permutations of initial positions. [Of course, such an outrageous claim would have provoked the rejection of your patent application.] Apparently, you are very hopeful that your brief, bureaucratically-indecipherable description of 'other embodiments' covers all such possibilities with legal and financial force. You should give-up all hope. Most experts within the chess variant community regard every unique variation as an entirely different game with the proof being in the fact that incisive games play-out with entirely different move lists. For example, when Derek Nalls argued on the Yahoo group that Minister's Chess (US Patent #RE32,716) was a ripoff of Russian Symmetrical Chess, everyone who spoke-up disagreed with him. Even though the board and initial positions of pieces are identical, there are a couple of contrasting special moves which can possibly (yet not necessarily will) affect the mid-game and/or endgame. So, you will need to pay the USPTO 453,599 more patent fees if you want to control everything that badly. I doubt you can justify such a huge investment, though. I hope you do not intend to sue or threaten everyone (such as Aronson) who wishes to play or invent games of the general class related (in your presumptuous opinion) to Falcon Chess. Of course, if US patent examiners were competent in the field of chess variants AND incorruptible from the offerring of large amounts of money, no patents for chess variants would have ever been granted to anyone due to insufficient uniqueness compared to predating works in the public domain. In other words, your patent which covers ONLY a single initial position could probably be thrown out of court ... if ever challenged.