Activision Blizzard Sued For Patent Infringement Over WoW, CoD 194
New submitter thunderdanp writes with news that a company called Worlds Inc. has filed a patent suit against Activision Blizzard, targeting World of Warcraft and the Call of Duty series. The patents in question describe a "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space." Worlds Inc. is quite glad that "their" technology has "helped the businesses of virtual worlds gaming and the sale of virtual goods to grow into a multibillion-dollar industry" — but now they want a cut.
First sentence of the first article (Score:5, Informative)
Filed (Score:0, Informative)
Filed: March 19, 2009
Re:How did they get a patent... (Score:2, Informative)
Reading the patent, which was granted in 2009, it seems no different than what Second Life did in 2002, so at least that much is prior art. I have not used other virtual worlds, so not sure if there are even earlier 3D virtual worlds as prior art. The patent makes no mention of Second Life that I can find, which given it's popularity as a virtual world, is a glaring omission. World of Warcraft was released in 2004, and also predates the patent.
In 2008 they sued NC soft, and NCsoft settled. (Score:4, Informative)
http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/04/27/worlds-com-vs-ncsoft-lawsuit-settled/
from the article:
"Worlds.com president and sole full-time employee Thomas Kidrin has simply exhausted his resources. Kidrin was recently quoted as saying "if we do not develop any new projects, we would have to severely diminish our operations or halt them entirely,"
Re:First sentence of the first article (Score:5, Informative)
The law regarding venue has shifted in the past few years and it is now much harder to stay in the Eastern District of Texas, especially if both the plaintiff and defendant have only a nominal presence there (e.g. their products are sold there via the internet or they have a couple of retail outlets). In re Volkswagen of Am., Inc., 545 F.3d 304 (5th Cir. 2008); also see In re TS Tech. USA Corp., 551 F.3d 1315 (Fed. Cir. 2008); In re Genentech, Inc., 566 F.3d 1338 (Fed. Cir. 2009); In re Hoffmann-La Roche Inc., 587 F.3d 1333 (Fed. Cir. 2009); In re Nintendo Co., 589 F.3d 1194 (Fed. Cir. 2009); In re Zimmer Holdings, Inc., 609 F.3d 1378 (Fed. Cir. 2010); In re Acer Am. Corp., 626 F.3d 1252 (Fed. Cir. 2010); In re Microsoft Corp., 630 F.3d 1361 (Fed. Cir. 2011).
Anyway, the Eastern District of Texas's reputation as a pro-patentee district is a little undeserved. The statistics on that aren't super strong. For example, here are the patentee win rates among various popular districts, taken from Andrei Iancu and Jay Chung, Real Reasons the Eastern District of Texas Draws Patent Cases—Beyond Lore and Anecdote, 14 SMU Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 299 (2011).
District Jury Trial Win Rate
E.D. Virginia 79%
M.D. Florida 77%
N.D. Illinois 74%
E.D. Texas 73%
C.D. California 73%
W.D. Wisconsin 71%
N.D. California 66%
D. Minnesota 65%
D. New Jersey 64%
D.Delaware 61%
S.D. New York 53%
(NB: That's the jury trial win rate; less than 3% of patent cases end with a jury verdict, so don't think these stats show that patentees win patent cases left and right.)
As you can see, the Eastern District of Texas is only a little above the average there. Its affirmance rate at the Federal Circuit is similarly middle-of-the-pack, and it's also not the fastest district by a long shot, with an average time to jury verdict of almost 29 months, compared to Eastern Virginia and Western Wisconsin with 12 and 13 month pendencies, respectively.
Re:Worlds Inc. is nothing but legal zombie, no IP. (Score:4, Informative)
There is plenty of prior art to invalidate these patents, but in our glorious patent system it will cost millions to do so.
Requesting an ex parte reexamination costs $2,520, plus a fairly modest amount for a patent attorney to put together the request. The Patent Office takes it from there, and any litigation is typically stayed pending the result. Worlds' patent portfolio appears to be pretty small, only five patents, so all five could be thrown into reexam for not a lot of money. For a more hands-on approach there's inter partes reexamination, though it is a bit more expensive, but still cheaper than litigation. Litigation is not the only way to address a potentially invalid patent, depending on the defenses one plans to raise (i.e. not all possible defenses are available in reexamination).
Re:How did they get a patent... (Score:5, Informative)
Everything but the 3D aspect was done in AberMUD (which used a 2D graphical interface in a dedicated client). Basic GUI-driven avatar-based multi-player interactions via specialized clients can be traced back to XTrek at least (XTank didn't use clients per-se, since the server transmitted X protocol commands to the client display), since avatars could directly interact and players could chat via a console.
In terms of 3D interactions, Second Life was hardly the first. Alpha World was earlier and even that was derived from earlier attempts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds [wikipedia.org]
Aha! Yes, Worlds Inc was responsible for Alpha World. That makes sense, and certainly Alpha World has a legitimate claim to being the direct ancestor of WoW, etc, and the platform that developed all of the technology used by Second Life, ad nausium. It's a push for them to claim the sole rights to MMORG Virtual Realities, though.