Next Generation’s gotten word from Bloomberg that Konami are filing a lawsuit against Viacom (the owners of Harmonix Music Systems) for apparently infringing patents the Japanese company was issued in 2002 and 2003 in Rock Band. The patents are related to ’simulated musical instruments’ and a ‘musical-rhythm matching game’.

Hit the jump for a little more news on this story.

In the Texas-filed lawsuit, Konami are not only demanding cash compensation (which could be huge, given that Rock Band has generated millions for Harmonix, EA and MTV Games) but also requesting that the companies are banned from using the instrument peripherals in future. This leaves me with just a couple of questions: why didn’t Konami pick up on this earlier, before EA had the chance to ransack the pockets of thousands of gamers, and why aren’t they going after Activision and their Guitar Hero license or RedOctane, who produced the controllers for the GH franchise?

Konami are no strangers to the rhythm market, they practically invented it (but are mostly uncredited or unheard of) with the game BeatMania (which involved a DJ mixing deck) and the do-what-they-say-on-the-tin DrumMania and GuitarFreaks franchises, which involved hitting coloured buttons on drum and guitar shaped controllers as similarly-coloured tokens scrolled down a screen towards the player. Sound familiar at all? Bet it didn’t sound familiar in 1999, did it?

Either way, DM and GF were around a good few years before either the Guitar Hero or Rock Band franchises and weren’t only on the PlayStation 2 format but made their way to the arcades too. What’s really surprising is that there are at least 16 unique GuitarFreaks and DrumMania games in each franchise, the latest just released in arcades last month. Why didn’t Konami pick up on this sooner? I’m pretty sure they aren’t completely blind when it comes to watching the American gaming market..

You would think that Activision and RedOctane, who produce the Guitar Hero controllers and will be producing drums etc. for Guitar Hero World Tour, would be quaking in their boots. Surely they’d be next after EA and Harmonix have been swiftly dealt with? In fact, they are very much safe from the groping hands of Konami’s lawyers thanks to that gorgeous little technicality known as the loophole.

As GAME.co.uk (presumably that’s to be shouted) point out, the GH homepage lists several patents used in the creation of the various games in the franchise. A quick trip to the US Patent Office website reveals that several of the patents listed (as an example, number 6,225,547) are registered to Konami, so Activision have given credit where it is due and hence have escaped the suehammer, or something. If avoiding a lawsuit is as simple as that, why didn’t Harmonix do it too?

I’ll be keeping an eye on this but in the meantime you can’t help but wonder: why did Konami never bother to introduce either the DrumMania or GuitarFreaks franchise to Western territories? Perhaps they thought it’d be too much of a niche, that nobody would buy into the idea of pretending to play music on what resembles a Fisher Price toy. Rock Band’s success might have been a bit of a wakeup call and so Konami might well have figured “this is really our money that EA are making…since we technically got there first, let’s sue!”.

It’ll be intriguing to see who comes out on top. I want to put my money on Konami’s “we got there first, you didn’t give us credit” argument, but EA (and Viacom) have vast amounts of money they can blow on the lawsuit, more so than Konami. Hopefully the law will play fair and Konami will get the money they deserve (since Harmonix effectively nicked their idea and exported it without giving credit) but either way, let the lawsuit begin…

Sources: Konami sues Harmonix over Rock Band - Next Generation
Konami begins Rock Band lawsuit - GAME.co.uk

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