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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.'"
Filed in 2000? Um...shouldn't be too hard to show prior art to overturn it if the patent indeed is applicable to operating MMOs. UO and EQ for sure...probably even text-based MUDs.
Bilski will invalidate this extremely quickly. I guess the company suing really thought NCsoft won't figure that out, or maybe they wanted it to be invalidated that fast?
Sorry, Xerox beat you to it. They invented everything first.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Lol...how many MMORPG's were out before 2000.
Somewhere a NCsoft lawyer is praticing his layups while saying *swish*
It was granted in February of '07
Anyway, this takes some gigantic balls. Granted I only read the abstract, but Ultima and Everquest were active before this shit patent was even filed.
<melodramatic rant!>
Only when we can throw patent examiners in prison for such gross negligence will we have true patent reform!
</melodramatic rant!>
No sig for you!!
If only they had tried to go after Blizzard... Worlds.com would have had their patent invalidated in a very epic way, if you will. :P
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
Yeah, prior art?
UO began development before the first patent was filed, was publicly demonstrated technology, and pretty much already did everything mentioned between the two patents.
Obvious point being that UO is a 2D game - or is it? It has three directions of movement, but is merely rendered in military projection by the client. As far as the server goes, every avatar is represented by an X, Y, Z coordinate set.
Draw shortcuts/prioritization by proximity, amount of other avatars/mobiles on screen? Yep.
Scalable server architecture? Yep.
Chat system? Yep.
Stable? So much so that UO is now the longest continually running MMO.
This isn't to mention Meridian 59, or the *other* MMO forerunners that already qualified for the title of 3D virtual world and were in public release before the first patent was filed.
Could someone illuminate what parts of the patent are *not* prior art from the earliest MMOs?
Because many patent attorneys are not entirely sure WTF Bilski has actually done to software patents. And "invalidate this extremely quickly" rarely happens in patent law after a patent has been granted. There are many levels of appeals, etc.
The Bilski decision invalidated a business method patent that was so abstract it could be done in a person's head. The dicta [nonbinding precedent -- stuff unnecessary for the specific holding] of Bilski said some soothing things that made certain computer algorithms appear vulnerable.
But really, do not overestimate Bilski. And don't forget the Supreme Court hasn't yet weighed in on whether it will deny cert to Bilski ... [at least I am not aware of any denial...]
Sounds a lot like my patent, "System and Method for Allowing People to Talk." Perhaps we should get all our lawyers together for a barbeque or something.
M
This is the dumbest most unprofessional patent I have ever seen.
Theres even a kids drawing in the patent.
The Supreme Court, however, has enunciated a definitive test to determine
whether a process claim is tailored narrowly enough to encompass only a particular
application of a fundamental principle rather than to pre-empt the principle itself. A
claimed process is surely patent-eligible under  101 if: (1) it is tied to a particular
machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or
thing.
http://ipwatchdog.com/cases/bilski.pdf
Lets all work to invalidate frivolous software patents.
... and you'll need to wade your way through 35 USC s102 and related case law to know whether alleged prior art defeated the novelty of this patent.
It's a crappy patent -- I hate it, it's lame, and I think it is pretty damn obvious and does not advance the art -- but as to whether there is prior art, that's another story.
[*Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, but I am a law student.]
NCSoft has been in a lot of trouble lately, with the recent loss of their founder, and closing T-Rasa. The company seems to be in some sort of free fall. These vultures are simply targeting the weakest in the pack, hoping to gain a few quick bucks before going after the big guys.
And the first text-based multiplayer virtual world was created in 1978/1979 by Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw. I thought everyone knew that bit of lore by now.
If you look at the link to the actual patent, and begin reading the claims, this does not apply to the (original version of) Ultima Online, or to text muds, because the patent specifically describes a 3-dimensional graphical world as being part of the claims. UO is (or at least was, last time I played it around 2001 or 2002) 2-dimensional. Right about the time I was leaving, they introduced an expansion called Third-Dawn, which still didn't make the world truly 3D, but it did make player avatars and monsters 3D, IIRC.
EQ, as I recall, was true 3D (I only played a trial account for like 10 days once, so my memories are rather vague), so it might be a good candidate for prior art.
It should be noted that the patent does not appear to cover (I don't know for sure; I'm not a lawyer), the idea of a 3D MMO, per se, but rather a few necessary client rendering techniques (which, in reality, almost any 3D MMO would be likely to employ) for determining what other users' avatars should be displayed by the client. It appears the idea they are trying to patent is that, in a 3D world, when you turn the camera to look a given direction, you should only see some avatars, and not others (that is, only the ones in your field of view). Additionally, if there are a lot of avatars, this patent claims protection for the idea that the client can implement a maximum number of avatars to display, and to use the knowledge of the maximum number to display, combined with the position information, to determine some subset of the avatars to display (presumably the X nearest avatars, where X is the maximum number to display, though the patent doesn't specify this explicitly).
I'd be shocked if EQ and Meridian59 didn't both do these things several years before this patent app was filed.
I'd also like to point out, that the patent doesn't specify 'camera orientation' or 'client view orientation' (even though that appears to be what they are trying to cover), but rather 'avatar orientation' (which suggests to me that this patent would only apply to MMOGs where the camera orientation is locked to the avatar orientation). Based on my 3+ years of playing CoH, I can tell you that the CoH client doesn't determine which other avatars to show on screen based on the orientation of my avatar - I can spin the camera freely to point in any direction, even look completely backwards from the direction my avatar is facing, so I suspect that NCSoft could claim that as a defense, if they had to.
Also, I think they could, maybe, make a defense against claim 6 (I'm not sure though):
Now, I could be wrong here, but I thought most client/server 3D game protocols do *not* have the clients transmit the position of the avatar to the server, which is part (b)? Don't the servers already know the position of the avatar, and the clients just send a vector, that is, a request to move a certain number of units in a particular direction, at which point the server calculates a new position from the original posti
NCSoft has Lineage and Lineage II which, though not very popular in the US, I believe are very popular in Korea (which is where NCSoft started). As the other poster in this thread commented, the City of Heroes/City of Villains game, as far as I know, is still quite popular and is making money. Sure, Tabula Rasa is being shut down, but where are you getting the idea that the whole company is going bankrupt?
From the patent itself: Related U.S. Application Data
(63) Continuation of application No. 08/747,420, filed on Nov. 12, 1996, now Pat. No. 6,219,045.
Now educate yourself on continuing patents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application
Now look at the dates for release of Ultima Online and Everquest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_online
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everquest
People on Slashdot discussing the Law sound as informed as your average senior citizen would sound on here discussing tech. "I PUT THE ETHERNET INTO THE HARD DRIVE WHY DOESN'T MY AOL WORK?!"
There's a reason why people spend three years of their life in law school. It's not for their health.
From the patent itself: Related U.S. Application Data
(63) Continuation of application No. 08/747,420, filed on Nov. 12, 1996, now Pat. No. 6,219,045.
Now educate yourself on continuing patents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application
Now look at the dates for release of Ultima Online and Everquest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_online
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everquest
Also if you look at the claims for the patent it requires CLIENT software that does considerably more client-state tracking than Telnet ever did for text muds.
legal and patent system can be THIS exploited.
those people very well know that prior art can be proven against them. but, they are taking an opportunity.
the same environment which allowed finance companies to make a total wreck of economy, bolsters such opportunism. these people produce nothing, provide nothing for betterment of society or mankind, serve nothing to nobody. instead, they exploit.
you people really need to overhaul your entire country.
Read radical news here
since your examples are simply more instances of prior art.
I presented public lectures on a system I developed called Cyberterm, back in the early 90s. I presented lectures at UK VR_SIG Meeting at deMontfort University in Leicester in 1995 and at the HITL (Human Interface Technology Lab) at the University of Washington in that same year. I can name names or people in attendance if required.
Each talk was advertised and attended by the general public and outlined Cyberterm's use of pretty much exactly the system described in the patent (which I had up and running at the time). The system had also been demonstrated to numerous other people around the world at the time and since then and was written about in WAVE and Virtual magazines in the late 90s and described in written detail in many online papers as well as a series of ariticles in the PCVR-Magazine (also in the late 90s). Some of these articles are still available online archived by the HITL Librarian.
As the author of this system and the underlying technology, I would say I have some copyright ownership of the technology I developed. I still have archives of the earlier code and it runs with a copyright message.
I'll be happy to claim a big chunk of any money worlds.com make. Patent attorneys and lawyers of other companies (NC-Soft for instance) wishing to defend themselves can contact me via linkedin.com (amongst other places).
pithy comment
This is something we were working on from 1998. We documented the design in some detail, and I released the documentation to prevent people from trying to patent it: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/fleet
The innovation in this (never-built) MMO is that the design requires no server at all. It what might now be called "P2P" (although that term wasn't around at the time).
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
There is a few games that was released before 2000.
Meridian 59 - Released in 1996
Everquest - Released in 1999
Asheron's Call - Released in 1999
This is according to:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/show/all/sCol/estimatedRelease/sOrder/asc
For those not willing to click through and read:
Abstract
"The present invention provides a highly scalable architecture for a three-dimensional graphical, multi-user, interactive virtual world system. In a preferred embodiment a plurality of users interact in the three-dimensional, computer-generated graphical space where each user executes a client process to view a virtual world from the perspective of that user. The virtual world shows avatars representing the other users who are neighbors of the user viewing the virtual word. In order that the view can be updated to reflect the motion of the remote user's avatars, motion, information is transmitted to a central server process which provides positions updates to client processes for neighbors of the user at that client process. The client process also uses an environment database to determine which background objects to render as well as to limit the movement of the user's avatar."
So basically they are trying to patent everyone from William Gibson to Neal Stephenson to Rudy Rucker's version of 'cyberspace' or whatnot. And I do think UO and EQ definitely beat them to the punch as far as implementation.