RuneScape Developer Victorious Over Patent Troll 89
An anonymous reader writes "Gamasutra reports that a US District Court judge has dismissed the patent infringement lawsuit brought against RuneScape developer Jagex discussed previously on Slashdot. Judge David Folsom last week dismissed online chat company Paltalk's claims that Jagex infringed on Paltalk patents relating to online network communications. The judge's ruling only resolved Jagex's case. Microsoft settled with Paltalk for an undisclosed sum in 2009 after the online communication technology company sued over the patents in a $90 million claim. That settlement opened the door to Paltalk's claims against other game companies, including Blizzard, Turbine, SOE and NCSoft. Paltalk alleged in the Jagex-related suit that it had suffered 'tens of millions of dollars' in damages. Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard said in a statement, 'It is exceedingly unfortunate that the US legal system can force a company with a sole presence in Cambridge, UK to incur a seven-digit expense and waste over a year of management time on a case with absolutely no merit,' and that Jagex 'will not hesitate to vigorously defend our position against any patent trolls who bring lawsuits against us in the future.'"
So would you say (Score:2, Funny)
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what i want to know (Score:1)
people still play runescape...?
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What the fuck is Paltalk :)
Re:what i want to know (Score:5, Interesting)
With runescape you get a good deal for what you pay for. It is falls in that nice nitch between causal (farmville) and hardcore (WoW) MMO gamers.
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teens... and older casual players (Score:1)
Re:what i want to know (Score:4, Interesting)
people still play runescape...?
WoW has 12M subscribers, RuneScape has 10M, others are far behind. In terms of player, rather than subscribers, it's hard to get hard numbers, but Dofus claims 10M, and I hear there's a free Asian MMO with > 25M players (but can't find evidence of what game that is).
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Found this for China MMO's
China’s most popular online games were named, with Netease’s Fantasy Westward Journey leading the pack at 1.8 million peak concurrent users, followed by Giant’s Zhengtu Online at 1.5 million.
Tencent’s Dungeon and Fighter hit
1.2 million concurrent users, while Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, operated in the region by The9, came in at 1 million users.
From http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/if-onling-gaming-is-growing-so-fast-why-are-the-companies-not-valued-more-highly/ [wordpress.com]
Cause my guess was Zhengtu Online (ZT Online) before seeing that. Check out this article:
http://www.danwei.org/electronic_games/gambling_your_life_away_in_zt.php [danwei.org]
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Also, I should have stressed that's just China. Not including, Korea and other Asian users (though that might be a small addition if there is many other languages available).
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I can't find anything more recent, but Habbo Hotel is the only thing I see competing with WoW.
http://gigaom.com/2008/06/26/warcraft-no-longer-worlds-biggest-mmo/ [gigaom.com]
Money (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has money, why do they always settle with patent trolls? They can afford to fight, and probably win, a lot of these cases. Perhaps the trolls know this and agree to settle for pittance, rather than getting in a court battle.
Re:Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Not paranoid enough, think evil! (Score:5, Insightful)
MS is not SETTLING with patent trolls, it is funding them. MS can afford patent troll payouts, 90 million is peanuts to them. And even if it was 9 billion, then that would be price for burdening all their competitors with endless patent troll battles. I let the tick feed on my rich blood and release a billion offspring on my enemies who cannot afford the loss of blood.
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Microsoft is sued a lot for patent infringement in suits with various levels of merit. Even if they win, they lose since it costs money to defend these cases.
Microsoft will occasionally licence their patents and will occasionally sue for patent infringement bt this is a very small part of their business. It's also something that is largely avoided. Microsoft has big enough PR problems withut bei
because they use the trolls to assist them (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the Immersion rumble lawsuit. MS settled with Immersion, part of the settlement was that Immersion was to turn their guns on Sony and then pay MS back with the money Immersion got from Sony.
So MS bolster's Immersions patents by settling and making them look valid, also giving Immersion money to sustain a lawsuit against Sony. MS gets to help crimp Sony's business and help keep out other companies from the gaming market without looking like a patent troll themselves. Well, until the truth leaks out.
Short version: they're scum.
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/147162.asp [seattlepi.com]
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Actually we do. Microsoft has somehow managed to convince quite a lot of people that they are different to the old scummy Microsoft of the 90s. People need to be reminded of the fact they're not, they just hide it well.
Re:because they use the trolls to assist them (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never understood it. Most ex cons have trouble getting a decent job, yet MS has criminal convictions all over the globe and rakes in the bucks.
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Because MS is not a person in the ways that count. You can't put MS in jail because that would mean building a new prison complex to house 100k+ people. They also have better marketing and a better skill set than most ex-cons.
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Which is why legal corporate personhood is such a dangerous farce. All the benefits of being a person with none of the downsides.
They could (and should) at least implement the equivalent of jail. Confiscation of all profits for the duration of the sentence which must be at least as long as the minimum a natural person would get and full supervision of management by ethics consultants and forensic accountants. The objective is to model the corporation's behavior into that of an ethical person. Since no ethic
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Oh, sorry, this wasn't the political thread, was it?
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How do they hide it well? Every once in a while (usually once a year), they'll send the latest FOSS quisling over to Slashdot to tell us how Microsoft really loves open source, but the rest of the time they, through their employees and business partners, they're taking potshots at FOSS, in particular Linux, which they still seem to be in absolute terror of, or they have Balmer reiterating his unsubstantiated patent claims. Then, at least every eighteen to twenty four months they demonstrate quite openly j
Re:because they use the trolls to assist them (Score:5, Insightful)
The Immersion patents were for an actual physical invention, the proper and just use of a patent application, that both Microsoft and Sony blatantly ripped off.
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Immersion's patents were very, very valid,
I don't have the time to actually RTFP, but would like to make sure that you don't miss the comment of evanism (here somewhere below), who did:
What a monstrous pile of drivel. Pages and pages of confused circular talk couched in language so broad you could apply it to anything you want. It's insane when a patent is awarded for something like this, when it was designed for a lightbulb, or an electric motor or gunpowder, but this pseudo-IT-speak is dreadful. I would say the lawyer who wrote it didn't know what the Internet was or how it operates. Bloody American patent system
Which makes the quote in the post worth repeating, and I like the typical Biritish understatement in which it is formulated:
It is exceedingly unfortunate that the US legal system can force a company with a sole presence in Cambridge, UK to incur a seven-digit expense and waste over a year of management time on a case with absolutely no merit.
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That's all well and good, but that's about Paltalk's patents, not the Immersion ones that the GP is talking about.
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How can an unbalanced weight on a motor's spindle be a valid patent? Controlling the wobble frequency is a function of rotation speed, something women's sex toys have been doing for decades.
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Best prior art ever!
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My guess (and it is just a guess) is that a settlement for an undisclosed sum with Microsoft is beneficial for both sides, if that sum is in the region of $1.
Microsoft gets a potential expensive irritant go away and sue their competitors instead, and the troll gets to scare people by saying 'Microsoft folded, so you should too' to everyone else.
I know what will make it better (Score:1, Interesting)
And so where do we get to donate to cover said 7 figure expense and otherwise bitchslap said patent trolls?
Checkbook's right here. And they still suck.
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The losing part probably had to file for bankruptcy, so that the corporation itself would die along with its debts (that’s more or less much how an LLC works). The owner(s) could then re-incorporate as a new LLC and keep right on filing frivolous lawsuits like this one.
FTFY. If Jagex got any significant money out of a patent troll, I’d be surprised.
Re:I know what will make it better (Score:5, Interesting)
A simple way to donate back would be to buy one of their upgraded accounts for a little while. While RuneScape is a free MMORPG, I think their business model revolves around these upgraded accounts, and that would probably be the easiest way to support them.
Otherwise, their corporate site has a contact page (http://www.jagex.com/corporate/Contact/contact.ws [jagex.com]) with a bunch of email addresses. I imagine that any one of them would work, especially if the message was "I have this money I'd like you to have". :)
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Probably better than the message that Paltalk entered, which ran "You have this money I'd like me to have."
Re:I know what will make it better (Score:5, Funny)
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I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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Perhaps you should invest that money in building MASSIVE YACHTS instead. And then give the MASSIVE YACHTS away in a FREE random-telephone-number PRIZE. draw.
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What I want to know is: if RuneScape only has an office in the UK, why was this lawsuit handled under the US legal system? Shouldn't the lawsuit have been taking place in the UK in the first place?
Re:I know what will make it better (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, most registrar's are USA based.
So if a UK company sued in a USA court does a no-show, the troll wins by default. They can then get a court order and have the company USA assets which includes their domain transferred to them. This may include even a co.uk domain as long as it has been registered through Verisign or any of the other USA based registrars. If that is not enough they may get court orders and force any USA ISP to filter out (or deny routing) to any of the UK company servers and thus cut off any USA traffic.
So in cases like this there are 3 options:
1. Shut off any USA business you may have completely. That is what non-Internet companies like for example diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies making generics do. In the Internet case this is rather difficult.
2. Pay up.
3. Fight it on the troll's home turf
This happens both ways by the way though the usual weapon in UK courts is not patents - it is libel and copyright. As a result a lot of USA Internet companies now filter out UK blocks altogether to minimise their libel exposure.
Not just the domains (Score:4, Insightful)
Jagex may have personnel only in the UK (I think Gerhard was being a bit inaccurate - there certainly used to be also a tiny office in London), but a large number of their servers are in the US because a large proportion of their clients are in the US and they want low latency. If those servers were seized it would mess the company up very badly.
Patents: another reason for such high drug costs (Score:2)
1. Shut off any USA business you may have completely. That is what non-Internet companies like for example diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies making generics do. In the Internet case this is rather difficult.
I was waiting for a drug that my daughter takes to come off-patent so prices would drop. Then the generic showed up. Then it disappeared. Now it hasn't returned an my only option is to pay for the brand name. It's quite ridiculous, and even worse for those with even more expensive drugs.
Did anyone READ the patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sadly, these lawsuits aren't new - some companies filed patents on multi-player network games in the 1980's, and proceeded to sue other game companies for using those techniques, despite the fact that similar games had been written and designed at universities and other research labs in the 60's and 70's. Even bedroom game programmers had worked on multi-player games using RS-232 ports.
Tales of Silicon Valley: Bruce Damer on Maze War [cnet.com]
New Boss (Score:5, Funny)
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Paltalk the giant Troll.
Will he be some worthless lvl 1 cannon fodder that only drops poop? ;)
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Whoosh on them, then.
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No U.S. presence but lots of sales? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Anyone in the US can sue a foreign company (Score:5, Interesting)
Just an anecdote here. I have a small software company in Europe. We sold our software to one customer in the USA - against the advice of our lawyer, who said to stay out of the US market. A year or so later, a person in that company who had been using our software lost her job. Her hubby had free legal services through UAW, and she could use them. So she figured she'd give it a try: sue us and claim that our software caused her to be fired.
Needless to say, we had to look into the situation. It turns out that basically any US court, even the local court in Nowhereville, can use the so-called "long-arm statute" to claim jurisdiction - just because you sold to a customer in their neighborhood. The fact that the signed purchase contract specifies a different jurisdiction is apparently irrelevant.
Sure, one could just not show up in court. But then you lose, regardless of the merits of the case. While any verdict might be impossible to collect, ultimately it might mean that no one from our company would dare travel to the US. It's not the kind of thing you want hanging over your head forever.
In our case, there was a happy ending. The fact that we actually got a US lawyer to write a rather pointed letter about the stupidity of the claim was enough to get the UAW attorney to back down. Still, it could have gotten really ugly. Needless to say, we have never taken another US customer. Life is too short for this kind of crap.
Re:Anyone in the US can sue a foreign company (Score:5, Funny)
I sincerely apologize for the lawyers of our country and the foul people who would wield them.
We've been trying to thin the lawyer's numbers for some years now, but silver prices are astronomical and there's a shortage on ammunition lately.
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Once the werewolves and vampires have taken care of the lawyers, we can send in gorillas with silver stakes to take care of them. After that, we can wait until winter, and the gorillas will all freeze!
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Don't worry, when US final up and tanks it. The stocks crash and burn (again). And this sends economic shock waves amplifying across the pond ... That upcoming Dark Age from US, your Welcome! You are a Visigoth right?
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I wouldn't use your story as a bad example. Any idiot can walk into city hall and file a suit. How far it goes is the measure of the justice system. And, that's where our problem is.
Countersue (Score:1)
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In the UK, the loser in such cases is often forced to pay the costs of both parties by default.
Which is how it should be.
Why should an innocent person be bankrupted by legal fees just because some greedy infantile pathetic idiot sued him when he didn't do anything that deserved suing?
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Which fails if you're so vastly outgunned. You get sued by $MOVIE_STUDIO for pirating some movies, and they walk into the court with 3 lawyers billing out at $1000/hr. All you've got is a lawyer working on the cheap. You win, t
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No system is perfect, but at least with this one, fear of losing a lawsuit can help stem the tide of frivolous lawsuits. Unfortunately, a lot of scumbag lawyers are doing the old "no win, no fee" thing now and the UK is beginning to look almost as bad and litigious as the USA.
Still got a bit to go before it catches up though, and as it seems america is still moving forward (backwards, shirley, Ed), the UK might be playing catchup for quite a while.