Microsoft Sued over Xbox Live

fiorenza writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Paltalk has sued Microsoft in the Eastern District of Texas over its Xbox Live service. The suit alleges that Microsoft's Xbox Live infringes on two of its patents, and that the company has suffered damages 'in at least the tens of millions of dollars,' which raises obvious questions about why they waited four years to file the suit (Xbox Live was launched in late 2002)." From the article: "Microsoft, as a company that runs multiplayer game servers, is alleged to be violating these patents. It's not clear how they're doing so--the initial complaint provides literally no evidence of Microsoft's guilt. The filing instead describes the Paltalk patents and the dates that Xbox Live went, err, live. After five pages of this, Paltalk simply claims that "gameplay on the Xbox or Xbox 360 through the Xbox Live online gaming service infringes the Paltalk patents," then goes on to ask for a jury trial. Presumably, actual information will be released once the trial begins."

Comments

Re:actual information?

[DavidTC]

No, he's thinking of dissociative identity disorder.

There's no such think as multiple personality [disorder]. There's just dissociative disorder, which can express itself as 'dissociative identity disorder', where a person switches between different sets of memories and self-identities, some of which are aware of each other and some aren't. Dissociative disorder also contains dissociative fugue, which is where, basically, they just throw their life away and make up a new one (You know, where someone discovers a long-lost person living in another town under another name with no memory of their other life.), and dissociative amnesia, where they throw their life away and don't make up a new one, and depersonalization disorder, where people feel if they're watching themselves from the outside. (People on both illicit drugs and anesthesia get that one a lot)

Incidentally, everyone dissociates every once in a while. If you've ever been driving down the road and realized you seem to be missing the memory of the last ten minutes, while you quite obviously were driving and even making turns, you just dissociated. (Either that, or you just got wacked over the head and your short-term memory reset.) It happens other times, too, but that example is a good one because you obviously didn't fall asleep, which is what dissociating is often mistaken for.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm nitpicking a nitpick of a joke. Sue me.