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Worlds.com To Extend Virtual World Lawsuit To Second Life, WoW

Posted by Soulskill on from the one-percent-inspiration-ninety-nine-percent-litgation dept.

FiveRings writes "BusinessInsider has a story about Worlds.com, a company that inherited the patent on virtual worlds from the Starlight Starbright Foundation and is taking it to court against NCSoft over the company's various MMOs. If successful, he will press on and sue the makers of Second Life and World of Warcraft as well. The article notes that the NCSoft case is being held in east Texas, which has been a favorable venue for patent trolls in the past."

3 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Asking for it? by 1WingedAngel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    IANAL, but I can't see where rattling your saber at a couple of big dogs while suing the small fish isn't begging to have some timely amicus briefs filed by the opposition.

    I'm pretty sure that's why the more successful patent trolls get a bunch of smaller cases on the books as precedent before going after the guys with real money.

  2. Re:800-pound level 80 Gorilla by EvilIdler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    OK, send in the Nazgul, then:
    http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20070416_virtualworlds.html

    IBM has many projects related to virtual worlds.

  3. Very Broad Patent by infalliable · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Reading their patent claims, they're patent is VERY broad and IMO pretty obvious.

    It's basically saying that the client passes avatar location and heading to the server, and the server passes the info on all other nearby characters back to the clients. Thinking about the problem for a couple seconds, you should be able to determine that it MUST work this way.

    Any MMO game with a central server pretty much has no option other to work this way.

    ------
    End software patents!