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Google, Yahoo, Others Sued Over Solitaire Patent
An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2004, Slashdot posted about computer solitaire being patented. It was a ridiculous patent and made it onto the EFF's list of worst patents. However, not much had been heard about that patent until now. It turns out that the patent holder, Sheldon Goldberg, is now using that patent to sue a bunch of different online publications, including Digg, eBaum's World, the NY Times, Cnet and the Washington Post. He's also suing Google, Yahoo and AOL (why not?)."
Thats too stupid.
I DEMAND SOMEONE KILL HIM!
with a deck of cards.
Why don't they go after microsoft too? They've been distributing a computer solitaire game for many years in clear violation of this patent, and they have plenty of money to sue them for!
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
We have a fly-by-night organisation, suing at least eight major companies, with a patent that is clearly a joke.
Our legal system works as much by precedent as by legislation.
When the NYT, CNet and Google fight this as hard as they are going to, this will set that precedent, and it will set it hard. It will make it that bit harder for frivolous patents to ever reach court, and might, just might, prompt a re-evaluation of the entire system.
All these silly IP type patents flying about was sure to backfire at some stage.
Good, I hope this guy wins, and opens a venerable flood gate that forces everyone to have a good and hard look at how the whole software patent thing is administered.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Will this finally be mainstream enough to reach newspapers and television so that lawmakers finally notice what is going on and do something about it?
Someone (outside the patent holder) must be profiting from this since it is allowed to go on and on... just like spam... I wonder if it's the lawyers...
One of the patents is for a method for playing games on a network. Network gaming systems have been around for as long as networks. For example, in 1977 there was a little game called MUD.
Obviousness in to the US patent office is of course different than the rest of humanity.
My little Linux and tech blog
Techdirt has more: details. To add to the conversation, it also asserts a "networked gaming system" but again that's pure bollocks as Quake and Doom before it obviously provide prior art even for that!
Shh.
My Clubs. Let me show you them.
...Lawsuits for patent infringement.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
that's the brilliant part of their invention i assume. adding a network part to a game you can only play alone. it's pure genius!
I don't like the idea of owning ideas and other things that do not exist, but if we have to have a patent system, then I think there should be a "use it or lose it" element to the patent system. If you can prove that you are trying to make a product out of it, or have licensed it to someone who is trying to make a product out it, then you are allowed to approach the courts to try to have your patents enforced. Otherwise, all bets are off.
70% of patent actions are by people who stockpile patents but produce no products. These patent trolls are just leeches are should not be allowed to hinder real companies who actually make things.
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So I can sue all those bastards that patent nothing and earn millions on it.
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
To patent chess or checkers? How about tick tac toe? Yes it's a new use for it but you might as well say printing on ePaper requires a separate copyright since it was never copyrighted specifically for that purpose. There has to be a limit set on persuing these claims as well. You shouldn't be able to wait until lots of deep pockets are involved for multiple years to sue so you know the damages will be high. The absolute maxium should be 12 months since a product was released but they should be required to give notice the moment they are aware of the infringement. Solitare is like traditional folk music which can't be copyrighted. It's been around too long and simply doing a computer version isn't changing it enough to warrant a patent. The code would be patentable but not the game. If they were all stealing code then that's a different issue.
More than that, I think, patents need to be limited to a (relatively) short period of time. A maximum patent coverage term of, say, a couple of years would keep the positive outcome of incentivizing research investment, as the patent holder would still get to lock in customers, but it would block abuses such as those by patent trolls or, perhaps, an HIV vaccine inventor who wants to charge $1,000 a dose on a (semi-)perpetual basis.
. . . I can't patent it, because it doesn't exist.
Aw, shucks.
Well, I mean, you didn't just start at 40, didja? You you gotta low-ball these things so you have a place to go.
As dumb as it seems, I cannot really be mad at anyone who actually gets to sue ebaums. I've never been a fan of the way he treats IP rights-holders.
As unlikely as it may seem, Microsoft could be a saviour in this case. If I remember correctly, its (rather good) implementation of patience solitaire has been in Windows since 1990. Far before the patent was issued. So there.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Traditional patents does most damage when the patent holder release some poor and overpriced product only few can and will afford, basically holding back the benefits of the invention for the duration of the patent.
I believe induction cooking was delayed that way, because the holder of a key patent only used it in its own very exclusive brand, and refused to license it to cheaper brands with better distribution channels.
It is much better if the patent holder has no products of its own, and instead offers patents to everyone on RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms.
Even better, of course, would be to do away with the patents.
The patent office pooped big time when this patent was granted. As long as there are patents, that problem will never be solved, but there are other ways it might be dealt with.
...
In some jurisdictions, "loser pays costs" is a way of inhibiting frivolous lawsuits. I'm not inclined to favor this, because one may too easily lose a case that has real merit, but
How about a provision where, if the case is duly found to be unusually frivolous, or glaringly without merit, loser pays triple the costs of the defendant and court?
And nothing of value was lost.
You are talking right :-)
;-)
...this patent troll's trolling?
Seriously, I see no way that anyone would do something like this to do anything besides prove a point. It would be like someone being sued over the 'circular transportation facilitation device' patent from a few years ago.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
My Solitaire stats in Vista:
Games played: 84
Games won: 1
Win percentage: 1%
=(
from what little bit i read, i guess this troll is going on to sue every MMO out there as well. i bet he'll get a lot from everquest.
According to EFF, the date to beat to show prior art is January 19, 1996. In 1994 Microgaming Software Systems released the first online casino in 1994.
http://www.gov.im/ebusiness/microgaming.xml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgaming
Any other cited examples of prior art? Help shut down this asshat and contribute your prior art info to: http://w2.eff.org/patent/wanted/contribute.php?p=sheldon
Or perhaps we just need to put a bounty on lawyers.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
I wrote Solitaire in Java to try out the language. http://bret.dahlgren.com/solitaire/ Can he sue me? Oh, wait. I wrote it in 1995, a year before his first patent. Can I sue him?
Wow, just wow. /golfclap
Despite the oxymoronic name, there does exist a fun multiplayer variant of Klondike solitaire. Each person plays their own deck and columns, but the stacks where you put cards in A-2-3-...-J-Q-K order are shared. Each ace starts a new stack, so there can be multiple partially complete stacks for each suit. The first player to get all of their cards out of their columns and onto any of the stacks wins. It's fast-paced and competitive.
Emulate them, get ridiculous patents and then sue everyone you can. Eventually you'll make patents worthless enough and be enough of a pain in the ass that there will be a change in the law.
The other thing is to file as many patents as possible with as little money as possible to gag the patent office.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
The only way I see the BS in software patents (and unbalanced copyright) coming to light is by the people who know the system doing the hard work of moving things along and educating the judiciary and public. The EFF is doing this. We can never contribute enough to compare to what the bad guys' lawyers have, but we don't have to. Just enough to knock some sense into people.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
I forget which but the best Apple // solitare game was banned and settled out of court on this same patent?
I missed the license part. Not sure how the GGP proposal would help then, presumably the patent trolls will try to get people to license their patents as well (that is how they get money from them).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImagiNation_Network
Since a few minutes of search can often break a bogus patent, I'd argue that the patent system itself is working OK.
lawsuits should be forced to pay everyones else's costs and then be banned from the court. Eh Daryl?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
masturbation?
"Use it or lose it" doesn't mean "make it or lose it", it can also mean "actively promote or license it" as well.
Could someone clarify -- when this gets thrown out (hopefully), won't the companies be entitled to get payback from the guy for all the money they spent fighting the suit? Given that these companies probably have the best lawyers in the biz, couldn't this figure be in the hundreds of thousands?
This is an outrage! Tell the King! Tell the Queen!
Let me get this straight... Rushing for diamonds? That's no way to win hearts and minds. That takes patience.
In fact, if they carry on like this, some hot-headed ./er is gonna club them to death with a spade.
I really hope that a court loss is on the cards for them. And if they whine, I say 'Deal with it'.
I don't usually spend my time playing solitaire, but I today I'm gonna play a couple games. It's just my own silly little way of telling Mr. Goldberg to go to hell.
Card games like these were implemented on Plato (University of Illinois educational system from the 70s/80s/90s) in the late 70s and 80s. They were called inter-terminal games. The terminals were all connected back to the mainframe. If you want to argue that the terminals were just display devices (512x512 plasma screens with keyboards and touch panels) there were also plenty games written for the PlatoV/IST/Viking terminals (later generation terminals that had 8080 or z80 procs in them that you could run downloaded code on).
Networked ranking systems have existed on Plato since shortly after the first inter-terminal games were written.
Patents like these are stupid because there is prior art available.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
They should toss patent abusers into solitaire... confinement.
Ouch.
No sig for you!!
Trying to drum up business here with the "Information wants to be free" crowd won't yield much, since the consensus among these people is that innovators shouldn't be rewarded for their work, so it appears your wacky sig/disclaimer is for naught.
Keep the government out of my ideas!
Blar.
Klondike is hardly the only solitaire card game, and once it becomes multiplayer it, by definition, ceases to be a solitaire game.
I used to play two-player Klondike a bunch IRL, but we never called it solitaire.
Karma: Non-Heinous
If you had 128K Mac in 1984, you could have played Klondike; the first solitaire game for the Mac, and that would predate Mr. Goldberg's patent by over ten years.
There is no security when liberty is sacrificed.
I suspect you could find examples of various card games on NovaNet http://www.pearsondigital.com/novanet/, many of which would predate the Internet by perhaps ten years. Cyber1 has a Chess lesson running, so there's one that probably came from NovaNet. I wonder how many turn-based games run on bulletin boards in the early 80s also would qualify as prior art.
This case really seems like an attempt to make somebody pay money to make this go away. Is certainly can't succeed, can it?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
lameness filter encountered.
That he commit sepuku with a deck of cards!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
It's Solitaire. As in, solitary. As in, ONE PERSON GAME. You can't have a networked version of solitaire. If you're networked, you're not playing alone any more, then it's NOT SOLITAIRE!
If you attempt to patent networked solitaire, you deserve to die. If you approved the patent for networked solitaire, you deserve to die. If you're the lawyer taking the case of someone suing over a patent on networked solitaire, you deserve to die.
In case anyone is interested, http://casinotime.com/ appears to be the site of the patent-holder in question.
Just in case lots of folks wanted to visit the high quality website and play around with it. All at once-like.
If you discovered a previously "undocumented" foreign folk song, the system usually allowed you to publish and put your dibs on it. The justification for copyrightability was that was that the new owner was making material accessible to people in the copyright system's realm of influence that hadn't previously been available there, and that documenting these old pieces was valuable work, and the people making these discoveries deserved to be able to make a buck out of it.
Anyhow, another twist on "prior art" ... I think there may be some rules whereby the US doesn't accept prior art as legitimate if it wasn't available within US borders, so if you did a tour of, say, Hungary finding previously undocumented folk songs, you could probably try copyrighting them in the US. But a whole bunch of European composers tapped into this scam about century ago, so there's probably not much left to nick.
Some Asian and S. American countries are increasingly getting a bit pissed off at the idea that US corporations are able to patent other countries' local public-domain solutions on the grounds that they can be regarded as "novel" inside the US, especially when those patents then get applied and enforced outside the US. If they legally have to respect US intellectual property rights thanks to things like the WTO agreements, but US businesses can register rights to their indigenous inventions and crops with no reference to local "prior art", then it feels to local activists as if the WTO et.al. are part of a conspiracy to **** them over i n ways that allow them no legal recourse.
This has complicated attempts to preserve and document biodiversity. You get seed-banks and universities sending researchers abroad to try to preserve records of local crop strains, supposedly in the interests of wider humankind, and the locals cooperate and share seed. And then when the researchers get the material back home, anything that seems to be potentially commercial gets patented by a corporation affiliated with the organisation, that supplies funding in exchange for a slice of the intellectual property rights on anything that turns up that has potential commercial applications.
Some of these countries have started to regard visiting Western academic researchers as essentially patent scouts working for US corporations.
It's getting especially fraught with plant strains. Many economically-important strains in the West are legally protected, and the people who developed particular strains are considered to have a monopoly on those strains, and on any new strains that are developed from them. So where does a commercial organisation find new strains to use in order to to develop new breeds, that aren't already owned by their competitors? They go outside the US and Europe, and collect samples of what's being grown there, and then they register the new offspring strains as theirs. Some other countries aren't too pleased to find that an increasing proportion of the genetic content of their indigenous food crops is being registered and/or patented by foreign corporations.
Eric Baird