Jianying Ji wrote on Tue, Jun 13, 2006 11:36 PM UTC:
There is a patent in the US too. it is US Patent No. 6,799,763, granted in
2001. A close reading of the patent gives one the impression that in the
path to trying to patenting the game in the broadest language possible, it
made the board more central to the patent, then the pieces. I am not a
patent attorney so I don't know how much weight each section gets.
One more thing about the patent: chessvariants.com is in the prior art
(reference) section of the patent. So PTO is aware of this page's
existence and is viewed as an archive for prior art info. So as these
pages grow, we will actually help improve the quality of patents going
forward.