Major MMO Publishers Sued For Patent Infringement 232
GameboyRMH writes "The Boston Globe reports that major MMO publishers (Blizzard, Turbine, SOE, NCSoft, and Jagex) are being sued by Paltalk, which holds a patent on 'sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment' — a patent that would seem to apply to any multiplayer game played between multiple systems, at the very least. Paltalk has already received an out-of-court settlement from Microsoft earlier this year in relation to a lawsuit over the Halo games. If Microsoft can't fend off Paltalk's legal attacks, the odds don't look good for their latest group of targets."
Doom multiplayer video came out in 1993 (Score:1, Insightful)
Doom the first multiplayer video game using networked PC's came out in 1993 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_video_game.
The patents were filed Patent 5,822,523 (filed February 1996) and Patent 6,226,686 (filed September 1999) I don't see how they could be valid.
Re:You're damn right it is too broad (Score:3, Insightful)
Err... Microsoft coughed up over Halo, and I'd bet MS have more laywers to parachute in than Blizzard could even dream of.
Re:You're damn right it is too broad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You're damn right it is too broad (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because Microsoft coughed up a settlement doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't have the resources to beat a lawsuit over the issue. It just means that their bean counters did some math and decided that it would cost less to pay these guys off than it would to fight them. Blizzard may decide to react differently, particularly since their flagship cash cow product is being attacked. We might have seen a different reaction from Microsoft had it been Windows that the lawsuit claimed infringed on their patent.
Not so fast... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes it's cheaper to just pay off the plaintiff than to litigate. Blizzard has deeeeeeeeeeep pockets and has a reason to fight this. Let's see where this goes.
Re:My first thought (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read through the patent, it's basically the same as a mailing list that sends out digests. Trivial.
Does MS actually WANT to "fend off"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft might not want to "fend off" some legal attacks... by paying a settlement, which they can easily do, they give the trolls the means to attack others who might NOT be able to afford a settlement, thus clearing the battlefield, err, market, for Microsoft's products.
I have no idea if this applies here, but this isn't cynicism... Corporations DO think this way. There is no morality involved, only the logic of competition in the markets, and there are no questions of legality, only those of court and settlement costs vs potential profits.
Just to clarify (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to clarify, after reading the patents a bit, HearMe does look to me like a bit of a patent troll or potential patent troll. Everything reads like the kind of guess about what a game might need, by someone who never actually programmed a game.
E.g., trying to sychronize the VSync on two computers seems such a profoundly useless and counter-productive thing, that it boggles the mind. Let's just say it would prevent the following 3 people from playing together:
- Tom, who has a 60 Hz TFT
- Dick, who plays on a CRT in 85 Hz
- Harry, who bought one of the new bundles of NVidia 3D glasses and a 120 Hz monitor required for it
It's not just that any synchronization in the sync signal would last exactly one frame, it's that forcing the 3 computers to display the exact same image would prevent Harry from getting any stereoscopic 3D effect. (He needs alternating frames rendered from slightly different view points, which the other two don't and it would make them see double if they did.)
E.g., just collecting and routing aggregates is
1. Useless in that literal form not only for games, but for IM clients too (which seems to be all that HearMe actually did make). If the messages in a chat room are that fast that you gain anything with an aggregation time so small that it's unnoticeable to users, then it'll scroll too fast to read anyway. And if you aggregate over several seconds, it produces abrupt chunks of scrolling that actually are disruptive and annoying.
2. Already done pretty much anyone who ever wrote a batch job that runs periodically. And I'm pretty sure that, for example, that FidoNet already worked that way.
Ah, wait, they have the patent troll "over the internet" clause. And FidoNet wasn't over the Internet. Sorry.
Well, even then I'm pretty sure at least some mail servers and NNTP servers work exactly that way. For a backbone system, the mail or news servers down the line are the "clients", and it aggregates the mails or news items instead of routing each individually to each client.
Re:You're damn right it is too broad (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why so many geeks on Slashdot have no concept how the patent system "works".
I think geeks on Slashdot know all too well how patents work... it is just a concept so alien to their way of thinking that they think the politicians and lawyers who came up with the concept of software patents are the clueless ones here.
Most geeks and in particular software developer geeks come up with novel ideas so quickly and so frequently that they find even taking the time to write up a patent to be something hardly worth the effort and slows their thinking down. How much uncommented/undocumented software do you think exists?
There is also a hacker (both black hat and white hat communities) philosophy of sharing information and techniques... where somebody who comes up with a novel algorithm gains respect within the community by virtue of the prestige for how often that algorithm is copied by everybody else. In other words, software developers are proud if their algorithm (particularly if their name is attacked to it like the LZW algorithm) and it is commonly used. This actually comes from the mathematics community, where mathematical theorems have a similar kind of reception between fellow mathematicians. Unfortunately for hackers and geeks, a good algorithm is seen as a cash cow.
The current patent laws explicitly prohibit patents on mathematical theorems... and in fact the language used is that mathematical formulas are exempt from patent protection. The argument used by software developers is that an algorithm is only a mathematical construct. Unfortunately, almost anything expressed as an algorithm can also be implemented as a representation of digital gates in hardware, so the algorithm can also be turned into a physical device that is tangible and made up of discrete components. That makes it patentable. BTW, the opposite is also true for most digital electronics, where hardware can be described in software... hence programmable logic.
As for the logic of allowing business methods as patentable concepts... I'll leave that to a whole other discussion. That is also something very recent, and IMHO just as harmful to the concept of a patent as software patents. Your description of selling baked goods via IRC is precisely one of these stupid business method patents that have perverted the concept of patents well beyond the initial intentions of the framers of the U.S. Constitution and why patent laws were originally developed.
A device that reproduces sound via recording the noise and allowing it to be played back... that is an invention worthy of a patent. Thomas Edison clearly deserved kudos and the protection for coming up with that idea initially. Patents were intended to protect physical devices from being copied due to the difficulty in doing the engineering and the infrastructure necessary to get those devices produced in the first place, so the government was willing to grant a temporary (read TEMPORARY! ) monopoly over the concept to get the inventor of the idea established in the marketplace and recoup the R&D costs that the copy-cats wouldn't have to deal with. For most software patents, that is hardly the issue at all, and certainly isn't the case with business patents.
Re:My first thought (Score:3, Insightful)
If you read through the patent, it's basically the same as a mailing list that sends out digests. Trivial.
While there have been "mail" games running through mailing lists for a while, MUDs would be a much more pertinent comparison. There have been MUD servers pretty much since someone figured out that you could telnet to any port and stick a server that did silly things on there (or in other words, since the 70s). Everybody who was around in the 70s or 80s had a few MUD accounts, if only to see what all the fuss was about.
It should be trivial to shoot this one down in flames (which assumes the lawyer understands what he's talking about and the judge understands him, fairly optimistic assumptions...).
Re:You're damn right it is too broad (Score:3, Insightful)
I can patent a method of using IRC to arrange the delivery of baked goods and that would be a valid patent (actually, it's probably already patented).
No idea whether it would be valid legally because the patent office is out with the fairies but it shouldn't be valid. That's just a particular instance of the use of IRC which is a general purpose communication medium. Because it is a general purpose communication medium no patent for a specific instance of that communication should be possible. An "instance of" relation not a "use of" relation. An "instance of" relation should never be patentable because there is always prior art.
The patent office, and you to some degree, seem to be confused about the difference between words and ideas (is a file system a database?), whether ideas are the same and different (are two shades of the color orange the same or different?) and whether one idea is contained by another (is using a car to move something different from using a vehicle to move something?). The patent office doesn't seem to understand even simple concepts like Venn diagrams [wikipedia.org] and the fact that words and meanings have varying overlaps and relationships. Specifically, patenting something simply because somebody has renamed and reduced the coverage of an existing concept should not be possible.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
You're absolutely right. All of those legal scholars, judges, lawyers, etc. who have studied and written about patent law in depth don't understand simple concepts like Venn diagrams. You are clearly the only one who has ever put any real thought into this.
Or not. You know how people complain that patents (and legislation, for that matter) isn't written in plain English? That's because "plain English" is notoriously vague and nuanced. Your examples - two shades of orange, a file system vs. database, using a car vs. using a vehicle - expose this flaw. Is a file system different from a database? It depends how you define the two terms. Is using a car different than using a helicopter? Yes, even though they're both vehicles. Is light at 590nm different than light at 635nm? They're both orange...
You say that GP's example of using IRC to arrange the delivery of baked goods shouldn't be valid because "it's a particular instance of the use of IRC which is a general purpose communication medium". You missed his entire point - he wasn't claiming IRC, he was claiming a method of delivering goods. Does IRC deliver baked goods? Then IRC being a 'general purpose communication medium' is irrelevant.
Re:My first thought (Score:4, Insightful)
All Software patents are obvious on some level. I still think software shouldn't be patentable, only copyrightable.
I'm a developer, and I still feel as though writing a program is similar to writing a book in that regard. If you allowed publishers to patent ideas for books and methods for main characters to traverse through the story, you'd basically hit the same point we are in software patents. Dragons would be patented to someone, Mystery Novels would be patented to someone else...