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Major MMO Publishers Sued For Patent Infringement
GameboyRMH writes "The Boston Globe reports that major MMO publishers (Blizzard, Turbine, SOE, NCSoft, and Jagex) are being sued by Paltalk, which holds a patent on 'sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment' — a patent that would seem to apply to any multiplayer game played between multiple systems, at the very least. Paltalk has already received an out-of-court settlement from Microsoft earlier this year in relation to a lawsuit over the Halo games. If Microsoft can't fend off Paltalk's legal attacks, the odds don't look good for their latest group of targets."
Software patents need to drink paint and retard themselves out of existence.
My first thought was this is great anything to force innovation. Something more then the same old, same old in MMO gaming.
But then again sounds a bit broad, as do many a patent these days.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Seriously. The amount of prior art on this one is more than enough to keep these trolls at bay.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Shared data creating a digital environment ... that could apply to Git, Subversion, Remote desktop, shell servers, IRC...
The good thing is that Blizzard should have enough resources to blow that patent out of the water.
'sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment'
Well there goes digital TV then....
this Paltalk company could end up making a LOT of money trying to enforce their patent. If they've already gotten a settlement from Microsoft, what's to stop them from doing the same to every company that makes an online game? They're already going after Blizzard and the others in TFA, but what about other companies? Would say, a company that runs an online poker game be a valid target? You *are* being shown the same 'digital environment' as others at the same time, even if it is just a poker table. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
Isn't Gamespy's matchmaking service, x-fire, etc, prior art? Or hell, given what Paltalk is, IRC
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Anything connected...this patent says it isn't allowed. It apparently invalidates any MUDsI played 15 ago, and the AOL games...so it must be valid.
Way to go winning a patent, assholes. You know they're always valid.
Sadly its because of patent trolling, Oh well.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
That way, there's actually something substantive to discuss.
When you can find prior art in the Jargon File, your patent is stupid.
Doom the first multiplayer video game using networked PC's came out in 1993 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_video_game.
The patents were filed Patent 5,822,523 (filed February 1996) and Patent 6,226,686 (filed September 1999) I don't see how they could be valid.
If I patent patenting, couldn't I just sue anyone who tries to patent anything? Since prior art is considered meaningless, there should be no reason why I couldn't do this.
does that patent try to cover file sharing by nfs?
seems that patent needs a review.
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
Don't most multi-user distributed systems (e.g. NFS) do that?
moral of the story don't role over to these trolls.
And defendants should be able to get legal fees at least.
'sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment' is a concept that existed long before Paltalk patented it. In fact, it exists today in the games that MMOs are a derivative of: text-based MUDS.
Sometimes it's cheaper to just pay off the plaintiff than to litigate. Blizzard has deeeeeeeeeeep pockets and has a reason to fight this. Let's see where this goes.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Sounds like you could appeal as the description is of an overly broad patent.
I'm gonna patent a system and method of doing stuff.
Didn't read TFA and I'm not a patent lawyer ...
Both seem to be about collecting a number of messages together and sending them as one parcel to a host in order to reduce the amount of network traffic and also to ensure that each host on a local group receives an update at an approximately similar time. Its a little like receiving a digest of messages periodically instead of getting them one at a time. The US Patent server appears to be a little Slashdotted at the moment - I keep getting Maximum Number of Users reached messages.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Patents don't cover the "what" but the "how". Sadly it is always the "what" that gets posted in these summaries.
I didn't check the date of the pattent, but it may be interresting to check if MUD preclude this patent... Another kind of program that may preclude is some BBS doors and some programs that may have existed during the Spectrum/Commodore/Amstrad/... time
The patent seem to be about reducing network traffic on multi-server systems, and having some way of aggregating messages to groups of clients. I think most early MUDs are single server systems connecting directly to clients and unlikely to be prior art.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Can someone who is knowledgeable about patent law explain to me how one district in the US can be so appealing for this kind of ligitgation when another is not?
I was under the impression that patents are awarded federally, however it seems that the actions are being taken at a very specific locality which is widely considered more sympathetic than everywhere else, rather than a national or federal court.
This seems very strange to me, surely the legal position on a federal issue should be consistent across the nation. Or the verdicts across low level courts should be able to be 'moderated'.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Wouldn't any server/client system be affected? Any database? Or does it have to involve graphical representations of the data? Why is that distinction important?
I suppose the real question is not if they can be sued, because of course anyone can sue anyone, it's whether or not they would have a case to answer, specifically because software patents are not valid in the UK. I understand that there are some minor exceptions to this rule, however I don't believe this patent falls under any of them. This will be very interesting.
The thing I dislike about patents is that it is in the self interest of their creators to make them unclear, obfuscated, and multi-layered in a way that means that even if the clearly over-general claim quoted in the summary is rejected in a court of law, the patent will still retain most of it's value. Having previously worked under them, will be interesting to see how Andrew Gower and Mark Gerhard deal with this.
As usual, Slashdot's summaries are the "OMG, here's a broad mis-representation of the patent, so we can whine about it" trolling. I swear if someone invented a new clock mechanism, it would come out on Slashdot as "OMG, they're patenting the cog." Because apparently some people just try that hard to belong to a big family of clueless whiners.
Actually searching for HearMe's patents (since TFA mentions that the patent was bought from HearMe) actually shows that they're a bit more speciffic than "showing the same world on two PCs". Not by much, mind you, but still. So the actual debate would be whether it's a multiplayer game, but whether it implements the exact synchronization algorithm described there.
And if you want to help those companies, knowing what they need help with, might help more. And just "it was a multiplayer" game ain't it.
The actual patents that seem even remotely relevant are these:
1. Method and apparatus for loosely synchronizing closed free running raster displays
The problem is that I can't see how it even remotely applies to multiplayer games, except via an equivocation fallacy. It's about "seeing the same thing" in a much more literal way: literally seeing not just the same scene, but the exact same image and synchronizing the frames. As in, the VSync signal comes at the same moment.
I don't think any game does that at all.
It includes such tidbits as temporarily changing the video mode to interlaced (which should look the same, according to them -- except to anyone who isn't blind, it isn't), to change the timings on one monitor, then switch back to non-interlaced when the sync signals synchronized with each other.
Again, I don't think any actual game does that. I don't think interlaced modes are even used at all nowadays.
The second problem with it, is that it's been filed on 23 December 1997, i.e., a good 3 months after the launch of Ultima Online. So if they actually want to push the "it's about seeing the same thing" equivocation, it seems to me the defense doesn't even have to go as far back in time as your Xanadu. UO already showed the same thing.
2. Server-group messaging system for interactive applications
Basically this one is about this: you have a server and X clients, and all clients are sending packets to all other clients. Think, an IRC channel, basically. So they propose that instead of dumbly routing between clients, the server aggregates the packets and sends the aggregates periodically.
The first problem is that a MMO only does that in a very loose sense. It sends the resulting status, rather than the bundled messages from all other players.
The second problem is that even if they want to push the equivocation that that status processing is a form of aggregation, MUDs already did that. Whenever you entered a room and god a "PrincessLayMe and MrMacho are standing here", it was effectively an aggregate result of the previous movements of the two players.
Of course, this has the caveat that their patent actually mentions aggregating over an interval, and sending the status periodicially, which MUDs did not.
However here comes the third problem: the patent was applied in 1999, a solid two years after UO which _did_ do just that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
i know a lot of you oldtimers who are still filled with last decade's propaganda and brainwashing will get angry with me and this will get downmodded, but, take the time to have a look at your country. everyone is trying any kind of means to extort money from anyone. patent trolls, strangling companies deceiving and milking users, filthy relations in between representatives and industry interests, corruption of justice .. anything goes.
im sure there is a goodly number of you who will be further infuriated because youre thinking america is the best place to live on earth still, 'far out'. i hate to break it to you that thats just another propaganda. there are a number of countries which surpassed america in their promise of freedom and wealth. i dont even need to mention which are these. and probably those of you who still think 'the american dream works' probably wouldnt have bothered to look further than your borders either. so ill save the effort.
but still take the time to reflect and realize that things are going bad in your country, and act up.
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Microsoft might not want to "fend off" some legal attacks... by paying a settlement, which they can easily do, they give the trolls the means to attack others who might NOT be able to afford a settlement, thus clearing the battlefield, err, market, for Microsoft's products.
I have no idea if this applies here, but this isn't cynicism... Corporations DO think this way. There is no morality involved, only the logic of competition in the markets, and there are no questions of legality, only those of court and settlement costs vs potential profits.
Can anyone tell me what effect the stupid US software patents system would have on overseas developers where there is no software patent law?
If an MMO developer like Blizzard were based in Europe could they basically tell them to fo, or would they still be able to bring a case and prevent them accepting paying customers from the US?
Clearly this kind of suit severely impacts innovation- what indie would dare try and develop and online game if they're at risk of being sued or forced to settle such that they can't afford either? I'm intrigued to know if the impact flows beyond the US and impacts overseas developers too or if they can simply say "Sorry, your patent doesn't apply in my country, get lost"?
Any clarification on how the US software patents system affects us outside the US would be much appreciated.
There will be lots of major applications that use client/server architecture to manage data for clients before that date, "Exchange mail server" or similar software should be very much covered also (no time to study the patent though). Microsoft or Activision law team should pursue invalidation aggressively, such patents are just too dangerous, not to mention the trollie surely has no real world application for this.
Just to clarify, after reading the patents a bit, HearMe does look to me like a bit of a patent troll or potential patent troll. Everything reads like the kind of guess about what a game might need, by someone who never actually programmed a game.
E.g., trying to sychronize the VSync on two computers seems such a profoundly useless and counter-productive thing, that it boggles the mind. Let's just say it would prevent the following 3 people from playing together:
- Tom, who has a 60 Hz TFT
- Dick, who plays on a CRT in 85 Hz
- Harry, who bought one of the new bundles of NVidia 3D glasses and a 120 Hz monitor required for it
It's not just that any synchronization in the sync signal would last exactly one frame, it's that forcing the 3 computers to display the exact same image would prevent Harry from getting any stereoscopic 3D effect. (He needs alternating frames rendered from slightly different view points, which the other two don't and it would make them see double if they did.)
E.g., just collecting and routing aggregates is
1. Useless in that literal form not only for games, but for IM clients too (which seems to be all that HearMe actually did make). If the messages in a chat room are that fast that you gain anything with an aggregation time so small that it's unnoticeable to users, then it'll scroll too fast to read anyway. And if you aggregate over several seconds, it produces abrupt chunks of scrolling that actually are disruptive and annoying.
2. Already done pretty much anyone who ever wrote a batch job that runs periodically. And I'm pretty sure that, for example, that FidoNet already worked that way.
Ah, wait, they have the patent troll "over the internet" clause. And FidoNet wasn't over the Internet. Sorry.
Well, even then I'm pretty sure at least some mail servers and NNTP servers work exactly that way. For a backbone system, the mail or news servers down the line are the "clients", and it aggregates the mails or news items instead of routing each individually to each client.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
is something like this patentable?
Help an idiot out here. How is this different from saying 'More than one person looking at the same thing'?
Would Government developed software count for prior art? I was involved with some development on a Government Project in the 1980's (a "Game" btw) that might count.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_%28software%29
nice post moraelin
The MMO Subspace predates this patent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_%28video_game%29
It was released 30th November 1997
The game is still played to this day :) www.getcontinuum.com
Would not surprise me if Microsoft was behind this attack on MMO's. I mean if they hint this company to sue them and tell them they will fall back as long as they get something out of the deal ( undisclosed settlement), then who's to say that Microsoft doesn't have some deal where they will get a percentage of all the wins hereafter as long as they said sure... you win. I dunno, maybe I'm just being paranoid but Microsoft has pulled many weird moves before. Not to mention there were so many games predating this nonsense, this is just too strategic for Microsoft to make others take a fall without us knowing all the details, specifically what Microsoft paid up. Imagine companies like Blizzard coughing up countless millions and small MMO houses going out of business and noone really being able to make new MMO's unless they paid a licensing to this bogus company... DOS anyone?
Suspicious!!
That was the real time sink at Data General in the early 90s. Played over the internal TCP/IP with Sun workstations.
Obviousness though it should be a defence is abhorred by lawyers for it's complete subjectiveness and has been driven out of the patent system altogether, and to a jury in Texas very little is obvious. Gaming the patent system is about finding problems no one has thought about yet but which will become relevant soon, the solutions will be trivial but because the problem is not one currently relevant no one will describe the solutions ... the solutions will thus be novel, and that's all the justice system cares about.
AFAICS these people succeeded.
Obviously everyone has forgotten DECWARS, MUD1, Island of Kesmai, etc.
The patent is invalid. That Microsoft chose to "settle for an undisclosed sum" according to TFA (because of HALO) only encourages these idiots - in fact, that's probably what Microsoft wanted... it takes the heat off them and puts it on the other guys.
When oh when will the USPTO learn how evil software patents can be, especially vague ones like this.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Actually, we're talking about the same MS which bankrolled at least a part of SCO's lawsuit against IBM. Including, yes, by buying their bogus protection racket licenses. Funding yet another troll that could hurt their competitors more than it hurts them, is exactly what I'd expect from MS at this point.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, for you it may be as simple as that, but you can't go in front of a judge and just say that you don't believe in software patents. So until such time as it changes, looking at exactly what a patent says is actually a pretty good idea. IMHO.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am looking forward to seeing how this is going to pan out, sure MS probably gave in, because they helped push the patent, so they want to help enforce it...even though there is no proof for the public of this fact. I am sure that there is a sort of under the table dealing here, where MS will end up owning this patent, and being that it was enforced somehow through misdirection on their own part, and the likes of blizzard etc..would follow, the future of this type of game, will be great for MS!
I hope the likes of blizzard and the rest of them, band together to form a sort of counter to the lawsuit. Hopefully by pooling their resource, they will be able to find a loophole should this thing be somewhat legit. Good god, I would hate for them to start asking us to pay even more to play WoW because they now have to pay royalties.
From a changelog on Debian packages,
http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/x/xtv/xtv_1.1-10/changelog
comes the following for an early release of xtv,
xtv (1.1-1) unstable; urgency=low
* Initial Release.
-- Jay Kominek Tue, 16 Sep 1997 17:14:36 -0400
I remember using xtv to view (and interact, as I recall) with others' X11 displays.
We probably installed this open source software from a third party's 8mm tape.
Descent (video game), Parallax software 1995.
Multiplayer mode over LAN (we blow off a lot of hours on this)
Zarni Maung shows a long history of accepting broad reaching patents that sadly affect almost everyone in everyday life. Back in 1996 I'm sure it was difficult to see what would happen with all of these idea's but some of the patents accepted by Zarni Maung help to define the internet itself. Also all these companies just need to find examples of prior art to 1996 correct? The other question will be if any other past MMO creaters were sued or paid licensing fees to the group that holds this patent.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
It strikes me that this is yet another case of "company buys patent from somebody else, company tries to sue people with their new patent." It really is quite abusive, seeing as patents are there to reward innovation by inventors, but I think I've figured out a simple and elegant way to prevent this sort of thing.
Make patents non-transferable.
So, the only person or organization who can sue somebody for patent infringement is the one who actually invented the thing. That might not knock out every patent troll out there, but I'll bet it would wipe out the majority of them...
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
If I were looking for prior art on this one I would look at SIMNET (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMNET) I would look at the systems leading up to it and the follow on systems. DARPA was way out in the lead pushing for distributed VR systems in the '80s and early '90s.
OTOH, I did skim the patent and it looks like they are talking about sending packets at fixed time intervals. The packets would contain all the little messages generated for the recipient during that time interval. That is a clever idea. Almost, if not exactly, like accumulating the motion of a mouse or a joystick for fixed time periods and reporting the accumulated change at fixed time interval. Something that device drivers have been doing for a very long time.
Stonewolf
Yes, because they are doing business in the USA. They can not bother turning up in court, but then there will probably be a summary injunction against them preventing credit card processors in the USA from handing over any money to them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You missed his entire point - he wasn't claiming IRC, he was claiming a method of delivering goods. Does IRC deliver baked goods? Then IRC being a 'general purpose communication medium' is irrelevant.
If a method of delivering baked goods using the telephone network was already known, why wouldn't replacing the communication medium with another well-known communication medium be obvious to one skilled in the art?
Actually, no. TFA says that Paltalk is suing based on two patents (not one) which, according to TFA relate to "technologies for sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment." TFA does not say Paltalk has a patent on "sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment." Confusing reports of what the patents relate to to what is actually covered by the patents is pretty much a universal rule for Slashdot patent stories.
According to a source with more detail, The patents involved area series of patents (apparently, not just two), including US Patent 5,822,523, which covers a "Server-group messaging system for interactive applications", and several others that build on the system in that patent.
Well Atari had the JagLiNk http://www.atariage.com/controller_page.html?SystemID=JAGUAR&ControllerID=22 for the Jaguar that connect two Jaguars to play head to head. The story didn't say when the patent was originally given but the JagLink has been around since 1994?.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Do sci-fi stories I rad in the '70s with multiple people sharing a virtual computer world count as prior art?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Damn, I knew I should have patented "Something that shares data with something else to do stuff".
I would be swimming in cash now.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
It's not only good for the medical industry.
Seems like this would also be the same as achieved by Google's, or anyones, server farms. Basically at some point in the pretty early says of the internet, someone saw enough traffic that they created multiple servers sharing the same information. That first example would be a very nice example of prior art. Perhaps that happened even before the web when there was enough traffic to bbs' or even ftp servers.
This patent seems to be about a way to keep big distributed game systems from choking on O(N^2) traffic. There are other approaches; it's not clear that this one is widely used. Current practice is, I think, that clients send to the servers, and the servers send back updates to the clients that only contain information relevant to that client. The method described in the patent works more like a LAN party, where everybody is multicasting to everybody else.
The mechanism described in claim 1 might apply to multiway voice chat. That's exactly this type of problem. If you can only talk to the people "near" you, you need just that kind of distribution system. If player are in positions where A can hear B, and B can hear C, but A can't hear C, you need the kind of aggregation described.
Better voice systems are way beyond that. I went to a demo at Dolby Labs where they had multiplayer positional audio with proper attenuation and occlusion as the players moved around. As a demo, they had a player move entirely around the audience, while talking to someone who wasn't moving, and it all sounded right. Thinking about that, though, the audio processing was being done in the receiving client (to construct five channel audio, phase-synchronized, you have to do it there), so probably the message traffic was simple aggregation, plus positional info.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/10/126219/Facebook-Ordered-To-Turn-Over-Source-Code
Gathering small messages together for a short while in order to send them all out in a single packet is a trick used to make the relatively show performing networks of the 80s behave better. You don't want to send out a packet for each tiny update; not only does that add to network traffic overhead, but it preoccupies client systems in catching and unpacking the multitude of packets. Saving up numerous small messages over the course of a half-second contributes very little (a half second!) latency compared to what would happen if you just let each of these things on by to the client systems. This was common practice for systems used by financial traders to track price changes on instruments. Instead of shipping 100 packets in a second, you shipped one packet a half-second. We did this in '86, and there had to be quite a few companies who absolutely had to solve the same problem before we did, because the network traffic swamped the system if you didn't.
It had some multiplayer games (Megawar, etc). Probably one or two before then too (and this was like 1988-1989)
and their race is TROLL
One of the main characteristics of the game 'Aviator' on SunOS (developed by Bruce Factor and future nVIDIA co-founder Curtis Priem) was that the protocol was designed such that mutiple client computers all had a consistent view of the shared flight space, with no central authority. There was a white paper on the protocol that made very interesting reading (back in 1990), I wonder if any copies are floating around somewhere? You can still find references to the protocol out there (look for RFC1340 and the IPv6 mulicast assignments doc: RFC 2375.)
I have fond memories of playing Aviator at Sun -- my favorite was the X-29.
I once programmed for and was an admin on a mud that actually had some functions / mini-games which used 'aggregation over an interval' and 'sending the status periodically' (ansiblemoo.org) The code was written this way partly to save bandwidth, but also to just keep that part of the game orderly and fair for all players, regardless of connection speed. It meant not spamming the players every second with soon out-dated information, and the delay also meant that players couldn't simply hammer their keyboard into victory. I think this effectively covers the patent... The code in question was first completed in 1995... or something like that - before my time (and the patent's) - and other similar code was written from 1996 through 2002/2003.
If I'm reading correctly, the patent mentioned was filed in '96 and issued in '98. Warcraft 2 came out in '95. Good game?
And immediately think of IRC, TPC, Nagle's algorithm, and delayed ACKs?
From the abstract:
IANAL, but it seems to me that if my server collects messages and then merely writes them to a socket using TCP, which buffers the messages, aggregating them into chunks of size MSS, then sends them as a single segment, I've violated this patent.
Did these guys patent IRC? And did Microsoft pay for it?
Doesn't seem to speak about seeing the same digital environment.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
one misstep, after the 23423295693 missteps they have made.
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if you STILL dont know that, that's the word to describe you. youre just another ignorant american.
check scandinavian countries. while local sheriffs are wanting to expose those who criticized on the net in america, in sweden the individual freedoms issues are at the level of 'whether swedish women should be allowed to not wear a bra in public beaches'. which, the women has won, and a court decided that it was inalienable right to be topless.
this should demonstrate how sorry a state you are in.
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