“prior art exists.”
Prior art from 2012 for analog keyboard patents
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I wouldn’t worry about those ones at least. I read through the claims of the US patents, and they’re essentially describing “turn the arrow keys into a joystick”. US8717202B1 explicitly limits the mechanism to a light-and-mirror sort of arrangement (thus, optical switches). US8922399B2 is a broadening of the former patent, removing that limitation (which weakens it a lot because it’s not describing a concrete implementation but an abstract idea), and thus I think it would be claiming other forms of analogue switches (e.g. magnetic) too. Either way, there are a number of products on the market that, if would be infringing these patents (unless their manufacturers licensed the patents). Besides all this, I don’t believe individuals need to worry about patents if they’re doing things for themselves only. But beyond that, I would be quite happy to ignore the Aimpad patents because the concept was not novel, and prior art exists. this video was in 2012 and I haven’t gone searching any further. Taking the broader ’399: the project in that video is, I believe (I haven’t watched much of it, more just read a few comments about it and skimmed it), prior art for claims 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, and maybe others. For the rest, claim 2 is a supremely obvious extension of claim 1. Claim 4 is obvious and shouldn’t be patentable anyway. Claim 7 is… “what? how else could you possibly do it?”, viz. obvious. Claim 8 is obvious (as in, if such noise is a problem, of course you’re going to do this, it
