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Worlds.com Sues NCSoft Over MMO-Patent
Lulfas writes "Worlds.com today sued NCSoft over its patent on a scalable virtual world, filed in 2000 and granted this February. This is a very broad base patent, and there is no reason to expect they will only sue NCSoft, when they should be able to use the same patent against other companies. 'Specifically, the suit claims that NCsoft has infringed on patent 7,181,690, "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space" through its games, including City of Heroes, City of Villains, Dungeon Runners, Exteel, Guild Wars, Lineage, Lineage II, and Tabula Rasa.'"
I am so tired of reading about these Patent Troll turds. Let's just pile these guys in with the likes of SCO and Rambus.
People with this mentality come from the non-branching family trees of the ones who also try to enFORCE DRM on the world.
Isn't there a joke in here about a ship containing 1000 (Patent) Lawyers on the bottom of the ocean?...
('Bout time for a ship containing 1000 Patent Examiners to sink also...) Now get off my lawn!
Is that your answer for the FBI Code Cracking Challenge?
The patent system doesn't scale.
As the number of people, innovation fields and patents go up, anything like the current patent system will fail and fail badly. Worse if you want/expect the pace of innovation to increase.
Personally I think we should just throw it all away and reward inventors with Innovation Prizes. Hindsight is always better. 10 years down the line you are more likely to know whether an invention was deserving or not. In contrast a patent examiner has a more limited time to decide to rubber stamp it or not.
You could have two classes of prizes - an "critics/expert prize" where the experts in the field award it, and a "users prize" where normal members of the public will vote to award such prizes.
This way you can reward both popular inventions, and ultrainnovative ones that the general public may not know about.
A bit like the Nebula and Hugo awards, but perhaps not in implementation.