Playing With Odd Shaped (Rugby) Balls

I'm a massive rugby fan. The sport, not the place. When my business coach "encouraged" me to start a blog about interesting stuff in the patent world, there was only ever one place I was going to start. Rugby. The sport. Of course.

So what patent relevant topic could I choose from the world of rugby? That's rugby union, by the way. Well, of course, there has been much talk around the "new" smart balls. No, I mean smart rugby balls. That air-containing object, the transportation of which from one grassy area to another underlies the whole essence of the game.

Reinventing The Ball?

There has been much reported over the last year or two of the new smart ball. No, it can't do maths, or quote Shakespeare, but it can transmit its exact position on the rugby field to multiple sensors placed around the pitch, giving not only information on its position, but also its trajectory, its speed, and even its speed of rotation. All in all, it's a very clever ball indeed. But how does it work. Well, here we are going to come crashing down to earth a bit.

The Tech

The smart ball is undoubtedly a great development. The tech behind it, though, is not new. Accelerometers have been around for decades. Since 1943, in fact, when a certain Dr. Per V. Brüel invented the world's first piezo-crystal accelerometer. The engineering world has never looked back since. Radio transmitters transmitting positional data to receivers to give positional and dynamic information isn't exactly a new concept either. So why is it so special.

The Patent

Sportable Technologies Limited were extremely savvy in how they patented the smart ball, or more precisely, the technology behind it. They had already filed patent GB2541265 which claimed a system for determining the position of players in a scrum. Obviously, expanding this tech has been key to the development of the smart ball, and the use thereof. Patent application GB2555172 is a piece of application art work which is cleverly designed to protect, in the first instance, the method involved in using the tech on a sports field, not only to determine the characteristics of the ball on the pitch, but also to ascertain where the players are. The power of this patent is in the balance between broadness of protection against protecting the technology which has actually been invented. Although an accompanying apparatus is claimed, concentrating on an innovative method meant that novelty and inventive step objections were going to be hard to find, and difficult to justify. In this case, there were none of either.

It would have been a different ball game (excuse the pun) had an application for merely the ball itself been filed. Indeed, their application GB2591216 was an application for the apparatus itself which can be found in the ball, and numerous novelty objections were raised against it. This shows the value of an effective application which not only concentrates on what has been invented, as opposed to going for the widest protection possible, but also identifies the subject matter for which protection can be sought.

What's Next

I am sure that, by next month, my business coach will have devised new ways to convince me to write another blog entry. What the subject of that entry will be is anyone's guess. With interests in cars, sport, and various other activities, the list is endless. However, I am now thinking back to the weekend when I was getting the mountain bike back on the road (there are an inherent lack of mountains here in the South West), and remembering the time when I decided to spare my technologically advanced mountain bike brakes whilst going down a rather rocky path in the Bavarian Alps. Perhaps I should investigate the technology behind the brakes I decided not to use on that fateful day. Watch this space...