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.
Sounds familiar (Score:2)
Sounds familiar... is this a repost or did they sue other companies already? If the latter, what happened to those cases?
How did they get a patent... (Score:5, Insightful)
How did they even get a patent for this? They basically described every multiplayer video game for the past 20 years.
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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.
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Hmmm
If you read the patent, you will see it refers to earlier patent applications on a related theme from them. The earliest patent application goes back to November 1995, hence it is prior art from before that date that needs to be taken into consideration.
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You mean like DikuMUD?
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VRML was a client side technology. This patent describes a server side technology for sending real-time updates to a 3d client.
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.
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Server-side PVS determination (Score:3)
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"... is server-side determination of which other avatars a given player is allowed to see"
So basically they're patenting algorithms?
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Yes, every MUD did this from the very beginning. Who do you think decides whether to send "Yourmom the Hobbit is standing here." or "Yourmom leaves west.", based on whether you can see player Yourmom (invisibility, sneaking, various detection buffs and such come into play here)? The server does. It's just not in 3D.
Netrek isn't 3D (Score:2)
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Ohh, look someone has patented that piece of crap movie Lawnmowerman 2 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116839/ [imdb.com] released in 22 August 1996 in Australia now including production time, that puts it well before that date. Now that is just one blatant example.
1) Watch a crap movie
2) Describe what's going on in patent language.
3) Bullshit Uncle Tom patent law revision, fuck prior art, if it ain't patented patent it and fight it out in court.
4)???????
5) Profit.
One can only imagine all the stuff that is c
Re:How did they get a patent... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what I thought at first - but the submitter linked to the wrong patent(s). They have several dating all the way back to the mid 90's that at least predate any commercial 3D MMORPGs.
Not saying they aren't stupid patents, but at the least they were not in fact stupid enough to try to sue their prior art...
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After reading the patent it seems like they got it for a specific implementation, which they believe is similar to the one WOW uses.
Not true (Score:2)
This patent goes back to 1995. This application is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application [wikipedia.org]
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So basically they had a patent from 1995, amended it with new stuff in 2009 and now sue people as if they had invented the amended stuff back in 1995? If this was continuous development then why was there a 14 year gap between filings?
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Pretty much, as far as I can tell. The nice thing is that unless I'm missing something any prior art has to cover all the new aspects added in the 2009 patents but has to predate the priority date of 1995, over a decade before they claimed to have invented the things in question.
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Not to mention, WoW and CoD were released long before that patent "Worlds" was filed.
CoD (1st one) was 2003
CoD4:MW was 2007
MW2 was 2009
etc
WoW was 2004
And yes, there have been expansion-packs and such since then.
not a fan of activision/blizzard but I hope they win (and set some form of precedent) or something that leads to a decrease in patent-troll-ism
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Unfortunately, 1995 was considerably before every single one of those dates.
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Because they filed the original application 16.5 years ago, when there wasn't so much prior art.
This application is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/353,218 filed Jan. 13, 2009, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,945,856; which is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/591,878, filed Nov. 2, 2006, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,493,558; which is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/632,154, filed Aug. 3, 2000, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,181,690; which is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/747,420, filed Nov. 12, 1996, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,045; which claims priority from U.S. Provisional patent application Ser. No. 60/020,296, filed Nov. 13, 1995. The disclosures of all of the foregoing patent documents are incorporated herein by reference.
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But still enough that the court should kick them out so hard they'll be wearing the bootmark for years: Neverwinter Nights came out in 1991. Several other MMORPGs based on proprietary online services came out before the original application as well.
They still exist but in Ghost Form (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.worlds.com/ [worlds.com]
It's mostly empty now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqel0k0NzNU [youtube.com] has a short walk around of something before Second Life came around, and that still runs well on 56k.
Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
There is this obscure game called Everquest that does all of the described elements of the patents. Everquest released March 16th, 1999. The aforementioned patent was filed March 19th, 1999.
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Forget that, there's this obscure game called netrek that beats Everquest by about ten years. And if you're going to talk about multiple users in 'virtual space', that's pretty much all netrek is.
Scratch that, beats it by 11 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek [wikipedia.org]
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AberMUD is from around the same time, but both are just extensions of Essex MUD which is from 1980 according to the source code.
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MUDs are unlikely to satisfy the requirements of the patent, as I'm pretty sure that none of them (at least none of the ones I played) send updates of only some of the positions of players in a room based on whether they are visible to the client. In fact, all the ones I remember only sent enter/exit position updates, which were sent to everyone in the room.
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No, it was filed March 19, 2009. But EQ isn't prior art; see this http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2785717&threshold=3&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=39679881#39681965 [slashdot.org]
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Though I sadly missed the game, Neverwinter likely predates the hell out of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(MMORPG) [wikipedia.org] 91-97.
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Search the page for the word "continuation" (Score:2)
you only have 1 year from the time of an invention to file
Open the patent and search the page (Ctrl+F) for the word "continuation" to see the real original filing date.
differs only by adding in the term "3D Graphical Avatar"
That and server-side determination of the PVS, as I explained elsewhere [slashdot.org].
Whichever is longer (Score:2)
this also (generally) means that the patent expires in 2016
Does the rule of 20 years after filing or 17 years after grant, whichever is longer [wikipedia.org], for applications pending as of June 8, 1995, apply?
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The application date was November 95, so presumably not.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film) [wikipedia.org]
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You missed a bit:
Doom did not do this.
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The customization that happened in Alpha Station was rather extensive and nothing like what happened with DOOM. I am scratching my head to remember if I played the Alpha version of DOOM first before I used Alpha Station, but they were pretty much contemporary with each other.
Alpha Station and later Alpha World really did have some unique elements compared to other software of the time including some extensive player to player interactions and what would be called today "emotes" on avatars. DOOM had none o
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Considering the customization of the visible avatar in Call of Duty isn't much greater than what Doom offered this cannot be an integral part of the patent.
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Doom originally sent all of the data out to all of the clients via UDP packets to a broadcast address. Network administrators absolutely hated the game because those packets would literally melt down routers and they had to be filtered out from the outgoing hubs or those packets would flood the whole internet. Later versions of Doom switched to TCP packets and kept track of the individual IP addresses for each player that significantly cut down on the packets being sent around the network. Doom worked ju
They are already prepared to lose. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see that they made a spinoff company to litigate with so that when they lose they don't lose the shirts off their back when they lose, which they will.
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No, that happens everywhere. Did you know almost every film is produced by a company, usually named the same as the film, which makes no money because it has to pay the REAL production companies 99% of the income?
Have a look at the tail end of the credits for a blockbuster film sometime, when they start rambling about the copyright owners and licensing.
hunt (Score:3)
really really ancient unix network multiplayer game
----
The object of the game hunt is to kill off the other players. There are no rooms, no treasures, and no monsters.
Instead, you wander around a maze, find grenades, trip mines, and shoot down walls and players. The more players
you kill before you die, the better your score is. If the -m flag is given, you enter the game as a monitor (you
can see the action but you cannot play).
hunt normally looks for an active game on the local network; if none is found, it starts one up on the local host.
The location of the game may be specified by giving the host argument. This presupposes that a hunt game is
already running on that host, see huntd(6) for details on how to setup a game on a specific host. If more than one
game if found, you may pick which game to play in.
The symbols on the screen are: /\ diagonal (deflecting) walls /|\
-|+ walls
# doors (dispersion walls)
; small mine
g large mine
: bullet
o grenade
O satchel charge
@ bomb
s small slime
$ big slime
>^v you facing right, left, up, or down
}{i! other players facing right, left, up, or down
* explosion
\|/
-*- grenade and large mine explosion
----
chat was possible using other unix utilities so it was not part of the game
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The patent clearly states 3D/VR implementations.
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Hunt is more than 2D as "invisible" is a 3D parameter above the 2D rendering.
Hunt has you can't see behind you as well.
Hunt even has dynamic environments in that the walls can be destroyed and restored.
Hunt is VR in that you can't see behind you and you can't see others or walls unless they are in your sight line.
You could make a 3D hunt client without changing any of the network code. And even play 3D hunt with other people on 2D clients without getting any advantages or disadvantages.
Was 3D hunt done before 1995? (Score:2)
You could make a 3D hunt client without changing any of the network code.
Could, but did anyone prior to 1995?
"but now they want a cut." (Score:2)
In other words: "Give me money for free! I don't feel like making an honest, productive living!!!"
A time limit needed (Score:4, Insightful)
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sigh. I wish people wuiold make an effort tounderstand the things they complain about.
This is a continuous patent. It goes back to 1995
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application [wikipedia.org]
Please try to understand the basic concepts of things you don't like.
Anyone who doesn't do that is hating something based on a 'gut feeling'' which is useless.
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Okay they patented something obvious in 1995 instead of 2005. His point is they patented something so obvious everyone in that field had 0 idea that the patented existed, but still came to the same conclusion.
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I have a very hard time believing that nobody knew this patent existed, and certainly the developers at Blizzard should have known about Alpha World and Worlds, Inc. well before they started the game. Worlds, Inc. really did create some amazing software that was ground breaking in a whole bunch of ways and was well known to developers who were familiar with the state of the art... because these guys actually did create some of the first kind of custom avatars that had player to player interaction. Not rea
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Ah, continuations on patents, that clever trick where you can legally claim to have invented something a decade before you actually thought of the idea.
I don't get it (Score:2)
The patent was filed March 19, 2009 and only describes the basic steps to display avatars in a MMO setting. WoW was released in 2004 and it certainly hasn't been the first (3D) MMO. The abuse seems so obvious that I don't think a trial would last long. And AFAIK the loser now has to pay the costs of the proceedings.
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The company's earliest patents go back to at least 1996 [google.com] and possibly earlier. You also have to remember that many patents are the result of continuations or divisionals and can thus claim the benefit of the filing date of the parent application. The other patents that I looked at seem to derive from the same early filing. You can't just look at the filing date of the application, you have to go up the chain.
And AFAIK the loser now has to pay the costs of the proceedings.
As a general rule this is not corr
statute of limitations (Score:2)
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There is a six year limitation on damages that functions similar to a statute of limitations. 35 U.S.C. 286 [cornell.edu]. The defenses of laches and waiver are also potentially available if a patent owner sits on their rights after becoming aware of possible infringement.
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,"
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I love how he's the sole full time employee, and still says "we" and "our".
Worlds Inc. is nothing but legal zombie, no IP... (Score:5, Interesting)
Those of us who worked and actually innovated in VR in the late 80s and early 90s have always been a little worried about Worlds, as they liked to run off to the patent office with all the ideas the collected from the rest of us. All of their patent claims existed in other products - even their first patents were an attempt to claim basic VR tech shown several years before by several groups, including the one I worked with (OnLive Traveler). There is plenty of prior art to invalidate these patents, but in our glorious patent system it will cost millions to do so. And like SCO, their legal zombie remains keep trying to extend old claims and collect something for the little invalid patent portfolio that was passed on when they shut down. The software patent apocalypse continues....
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).
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Of any complaints that I've seen here, this is the most legitimate. Most of the other claims of stuff like World of Warcraft being the first to do stuff like this just make me want to puke in terms of the sheer ignorance of the people posting.
There were many sources of ideas that came from the virtual reality community, and I agree with the sentiments you are making here. The patents were filed though and not invalidated, and I certainly hate the software patent system including how difficult it is to pro
Duke 3d is more prior art (Score:2)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D released 1996 and while doom is referenced, duke is not. I also think the detailed list of commands would not bode well for them since each program would have it's own language and functions. Most don't even use plain english such as world's "invention"
Many Seem To Have Expired (Score:2)
I double checked, but a number of those patents are no longer enforceable since prior to 1995 it was 17 years from the filing date. After that it was 20 years after the filing date. With the earliest date being 1977. My guess is they are throwing them all in, and hoping some stick. So everything filed in 1994 (2011 is 17 years later) or earlier has already expired. Lack of enforcement of the patents may work against them too.
First sentence of the first article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:First sentence of the first article (Score:5, Funny)
Wow.
They REALLY don't know what they're doing.
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Noobs...
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Beginner's mistake. All trolls must file in the Eastern District of Texas.
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The previous owner of Alpha Worlds split off or something... There was some sort of drama, which created, I believe, Worlds inc.
For those of you who dont know, Alpha World was essentially a "Second Life" type adventure, where you can claim land a build your own house. Although it was mostly prefab type items, it did evolve to allow some modifications and customizations.
I was known on the
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Doesn't matter. The technique described in the claims (essentially, a server that works out which other users a user's avatar is able to see and only sends position updates for those, with various variations - all of which are obvious - involving how the necessary information is to be stored in a database) is so fundamental, I find it highly unlikely that there was no prior art older than even that. The defendants should be looking at, for example, CitySpace, a networked virtual world system that was demo
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(essentially, a server that works out which other users a user's avatar is able to see and only sends position updates for those, with various variations - all of which are obvious - involving how the necessary information is to be stored in a database) is so fundamental
Text-based MUDs do that, and have been around since the 80s. The algorithm implementation required to determine who sees who and what motion updates are sent is much simpler, but the principal of sending updates to a server, and the se
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What happened was that the "modding" community around the original Alpha World ended up becoming more successful from a financial standpoint than the game/world itself. One of the companies that was producing content and providing stuff for players ended up buying out the company producing the main engine software, including all of the "intellectual property". Essentially the original development team really didn't know how to turn a profit out of the virtual world in spite of some pretty ambitious busine
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It doesn't matter if they have a valid complaint. They deliberately waited for the business to grow before going to court.
If they wanted to sue, they should've done it a decade ago.
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.
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Definitely agree. I wrote something [slashdot.org] awhile back in response to someone else making a snarky comment about East Texas courts being patent troll friendly. Your numbers are more recent than mine, since mine were for 1995-2009, but mine also included data on summary judgments, which accounted for a decent number of case outcomes.
Long story short, it deserved the reputation of being a patent troll haven at one point (for about a year in the mid-2000s), but not any longer.
Re:First sentence of the first article (Score:4, Insightful)
FWIW, the judge that made East Texas famous for it's patent rocket docket has retired (about 6 months ago [news-journal.com]). So not only is it not the patent-friendly court it used to be, but that particular judge no longer serves as well.
Re:First sentence of the first article (Score:4, Insightful)
Horrible statistical assumptions here. To compare success rates only, is to assume that the quality of the complaints in all districts had the same distribution. For the sake of argument lets say that 100% of the frivolous cases were filed in E. Texas and 0% in S. NY. You can plainly see that success rate alone would tell you nothing. I understand that this is not the case, the numbers are simply meant to illustrate the assumption being made.
In real terms there is reason to believe that there is indeed a skew in the validity of the cases brought however. How much? I have no idea. Perhaps a better statistic would be the number or trials verdicts that have been overturned?
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Clearly Massachusetts is the new Eastern Texas; The folks in Texas must have begun to suspect that something strange is going on.
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Nope, not in Eastern District of Texas. According to this article [ipfrontline.com]:
Worlds Inc. filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, Inc., Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. and Activision Publishing, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on March 30, 2012.
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isn't that another court that is very friendly to plaintiffs in patent lawsuits as well?
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I don't believe so. Delaware and Florida Middle are the two district courts that have higher patent troll success rates than East Texas.
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Here's the thing... here I was hoping to shoot it down with prior art, mentioning stuff like DikuMUD, and such.... then I checked the patent and realized that it was filed in 2009.
WoW had already been on the market for several years by that point....
Priority date: 1995 (Score:3)
it was filed in 2009
The patent "claims priority from U.S. Provisional patent application Ser. No. 60/020,296, filed Nov. 13, 1995".
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Isn't that what's called a submarine patent? Why the huge discrepancy in dates between the two?
3D + customization + server-side PVS (Score:2)
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What's interesting is in that very same claim, the server already removed avatars:
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What's interesting is in that very same claim, the server already removed avatars:
So as long as the server removes all of the not-visible avatars or none of the not-visible avatars, it's not infringing. As far as "black box" though, I'd be tempted to guess that the server does some checks but not all... after all, WoW had all those warping loopholes people were using a while back so at least some processing of some kind is done client side. If WoW's server doesn't know where the user's avatar is actually standing, the best it could do is send all the avatars in the general area and the client figures out which it sees based on viewport direction.
Carmack engines use BSP trees, network code will sent player positions for all the players in the same room/branch + safety margin, meaning you will get info about them even if they are behind a wall to minimize popup (players popping up into existence from around the corner instead of just appearing seamlessly)
that is If you insist on ignoring software patent being a total BS and think that patents on software are valid (they are not)
"fewer than all of the other user avatars" (Score:2)
Why a rough and refined PVS (Score:2)
Every transmitted and received avatar information is displayed at least on the mini-map. Hence, no further constriction of the avatars transmitted to avatars displayed exists.
I don't play Call of Duty series, but my cousin does. I don't remember seeing members of the opposing team on the mini-map. And avatars that aren't visible but may become visible within the next ping time, such as those just about to peek out from behind a wall, would have to get filtered out at the client.
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The patents in question date back to at least 1996. Anyway, if it's that easy to find prior art then the case should be a slam dunk.
The trick is apparently that they've used continuations in part, which allows them to patent new improvements on an existing patent in such a way that any prior art for them only counts if it predate the original patent - which in this case means that the prior art has to be over a decade older than the claimed inventions by Worlds Inc. I've no idea who thought this aspect of patent law was a good idea.
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Greetings and Salutations;
Yes I was going to bring this up, if no one else mentioned it. It was quite an interesting concept, and, for the beta testing period was hugely popular. However, as a business model it was a massive fail. The day that World's Chat closed its free access and required a paid registration it lost about 99% of its customer base, and, I suspect that shortly thereafter it reached 100%.
It was my understandin
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Actually what you said means the opposite (Score:2)
If they had a 3D chat client and game in 1995, which contains portions of the patent (which was filed in 1999),
they essentially made their own prior art.
IANAL either, but AFAIK you had 1 year in the US during which you could file a patent after its technology went public, and in Europe you had to file the patent before you made you technology public.
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Latinum itself is a liquid. The gold bars and such are just containers.