Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look and Feel Free
Somebody raised an interesting point on reddit about patent trolls:<p>BobTheSCV&gt; Neverwinter Nights also implemented them, and they worked very well. I had just assumed it was patent trolls or something that kept them from being widely adopted.<p>I replied:<p>You are absolutely correct about the patent trolls!<p>Bill Buxton at Alias and his marketing team spread a bunch of inaccurate FUD about their &quot;marking menu patent&quot;, which I accidentally discovered and tried to correct and get him to stop doing decades ago, but he refused, and continued to spread FUD.<p>So Alias kept advertising their &quot;patented marking menus&quot; for DECADES, purposefully and successfully discouraging their competition 3D Studio Max, AND many other developers of free and proprietary apps as collateral damage, from adopting them.<p>When I asked Buxton about the &quot;marking menu patent&quot; before it was granted, he lied point blank to me that there was no &quot;marking menu patent&quot;, so I couldn&#x27;t prove to Kinetix that it was OK to use them, or contact the patent office and inform them about the mistakes in their claims about prior art, and the fact that the &quot;overflow&quot; technique they were claiming in the patent was obvious.<p>The whole story is here:<p>Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@donhopkins&#x2F;pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptions-be8afc49d870" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@donhopkins&#x2F;pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptio...</a><p>Some excerpts:<p>&gt;There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.<p>&gt;Unfortunately they were able to successfully deceive the patent reviewers, even though the patent references the Dr. Dobb’s Journal article which clearly describes how pie menu selection and mouse ahead work, contradicting the incorrect claims in the patent. It’s sad that this kind of deception and patent trolling is all too common in the industry, and it causes so many problems.<p>Even today, long after the patent has expired, Autodesk marketing brochures continue to spread FUD to scare other people away from using marking menus, by bragging that “Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.”<p>A snapshot of Alias&#x27;s claim about &quot;Patented marking menus&quot; from one of their brochures that they are still distributing, even years after their bad patent has expired:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn-images-1.medium.com&#x2F;max&#x2F;450&#x2F;1*3C79dFnlhN__OJ3XmEjN9A.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn-images-1.medium.com&#x2F;max&#x2F;450&#x2F;1*3C79dFnlhN__OJ3XmE...</a><p>&gt;&quot;Marking Menus: Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.autodesk.com&#x2F;adsk&#x2F;files&#x2F;aliasdesign10_detail_bro_us.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.autodesk.com&#x2F;adsk&#x2F;files&#x2F;aliasdesign10_detail_b...</a><p>&gt;The Long Tail Consequences of Bad Patents and FUD<p>&gt;I attended the computer game developer’s conference in the late 90’s, while I was working at Maxis on The Sims. Since we were using 3D Studio Max, I stopped by the Kinetix booth on the trade show floor, and asked them for some advice integrating my existing ActiveX pie menus into their 3D editing tool.<p>&gt;They told me that Alias had “marking menus” which were like pie menus, and that Kinetix’s customers had been requesting that feature, but since Alias had patented marking menus, they were afraid to use pie menus or anything resembling them for fear of being sued for patent infringement.<p>&gt;I told them that sounded like bullshit since there was plenty of prior art, so Alias couldn’t get a legitimate patent on “marking menus”.<p>&gt;The guy from Kinetix told me that if I didn’t believe him, I should walk across the aisle and ask the people at the Alias booth. So I did.<p>&gt;When I asked one of the Alias sales people if their “marking menus” were patented, he immediately blurted out “of course they are!” So I showed him the ActiveX pie menus on my laptop, and told him that I needed to get in touch with their legal department because they had patented something that I had been working on for many years, and had used in several published products, including The Sims, and I didn’t want them to sue me or EA for patent infringement.<p>&gt;When I tried to pin down the Alias marketing representative about what exactly it was that Alias had patented, he started weaseling and changing his story several times. He finally told me that Bill Buxton was the one who invented marking menus, that he was the one behind the patent, that he was the senior user interface researcher at SGI&#x2F;Alias, and that I should talk to him. He never mentioned Gordon Kurtenbach, only Bill Buxton.<p>&gt;So I called Bill Buxton at Alias, who stonewalled and claimed that there was no patent on marking menus (which turned out to be false, because he was just being coy for legal reasons). He said he felt insulted that I would think he would patent something that we both knew very well was covered by prior art.<p>At the time I didn&#x27;t know the term, but that&#x27;s what we now call &quot;gaslighting&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gaslighting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gaslighting</a><p>Gee, who do we all know who lies and then tries to turn it all around to blame the person who they bullied, and then tries to play the victim themselves? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Donald_Trump" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Donald_Trump</a><p>Gordon Kurtenbach, who did the work and got the patent that Alias marketing people were bragging about in Bill Buxton&#x27;s name agrees:<p>Gordon&gt; Don, I read and understand your sequence of events. Thanks. It sounds like it was super frustrating, to put it mildly. Also, I know, having read dozens of patents, that patents are the most obtuse and maddening things to read. And yes, the patent lawyers will make the claims as broad as the patent office will allow. So you were right to be concerned. Clearly, marketing is marketing, and love to say in-precise things like “patented marking menus”.<p>Gordon&gt; At the time Bill or I could have said to you “off the record, its ok, just don’t use the radial&#x2F;linear combo”. I think this was what Bill was trying to say when he said “there’s no patent on marking menus”. That was factually true. However, given that Max was the main rival, we didn’t want to do them any favors. So those were the circumstances that lead to those events.<p>What&#x27;s ironic is that Autodesk now owns both Alias and 3D Studio Max. Gordon confirmed that Alias&#x27;s FUD did indeed discourage Kinetix from implementing marking menus or pie menus, which were not actually covered by the patent:<p>Gordon&gt; After Autodesk acquired Alias, I talked to the manager who was interested in getting pie menus in Max. Yes, he said he that the Alias patents discouraged them from implementing pie menus but they didn’t understand the patents in any detail. Had you at the time said “as long we don’t use the overflows we are not infringing” that would have been fine. I remember at the time thinking “they never read the patent claims”.<p>Don&gt; The 3D Studio Max developers heard about the Alias marking menu patent from Alias marketing long before I heard of it from them on the trade show floor.<p>Don&gt; The reason I didn’t know the patent only covered overflows was that I had never seen the patent, of course. And when I asked Buxton about it, he lied to me that “there is no marking menu patent”. He was trying to be coy by pretending he didn’t understand which patent I was talking about, but his intent was to deceive and obfuscate in order to do as much harm to Kinetix 3D Studio Max users as possible, and unfortunately he succeeded at his unethical goal.<p>What&#x27;s even worse is that in Buxton&#x27;s zeal to attack 3D Studio Max users, he also attacked users of free software tools like Blender.<p>&gt;The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades<p>&gt;Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blenderartists.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;when-will-marking-menu-patent-expire&#x2F;618541" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blenderartists.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;when-will-marking-menu-patent-e...</a><p>&gt;As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:<p>&gt;&quot;Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know.&quot;<p>&gt;The good news: Decades late due to patents and FUD, pie menus have finally come to 3D Studio Max just recently (January 2018)!<p>Radially - Pie menu editor for 3ds Max: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sjLYmobb8vI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sjLYmobb8vI</a>