Slashdot Mirror
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."
If you read through the patent, it's basically the same as a mailing list that sends out digests. Trivial.
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.
I don't understand why so many geeks on Slashdot have no concept how the patent system "works".
I think geeks on Slashdot know all too well how patents work... it is just a concept so alien to their way of thinking that they think the politicians and lawyers who came up with the concept of software patents are the clueless ones here.
Most geeks and in particular software developer geeks come up with novel ideas so quickly and so frequently that they find even taking the time to write up a patent to be something hardly worth the effort and slows their thinking down. How much uncommented/undocumented software do you think exists?
There is also a hacker (both black hat and white hat communities) philosophy of sharing information and techniques... where somebody who comes up with a novel algorithm gains respect within the community by virtue of the prestige for how often that algorithm is copied by everybody else. In other words, software developers are proud if their algorithm (particularly if their name is attacked to it like the LZW algorithm) and it is commonly used. This actually comes from the mathematics community, where mathematical theorems have a similar kind of reception between fellow mathematicians. Unfortunately for hackers and geeks, a good algorithm is seen as a cash cow.
The current patent laws explicitly prohibit patents on mathematical theorems... and in fact the language used is that mathematical formulas are exempt from patent protection. The argument used by software developers is that an algorithm is only a mathematical construct. Unfortunately, almost anything expressed as an algorithm can also be implemented as a representation of digital gates in hardware, so the algorithm can also be turned into a physical device that is tangible and made up of discrete components. That makes it patentable. BTW, the opposite is also true for most digital electronics, where hardware can be described in software... hence programmable logic.
As for the logic of allowing business methods as patentable concepts... I'll leave that to a whole other discussion. That is also something very recent, and IMHO just as harmful to the concept of a patent as software patents. Your description of selling baked goods via IRC is precisely one of these stupid business method patents that have perverted the concept of patents well beyond the initial intentions of the framers of the U.S. Constitution and why patent laws were originally developed.
A device that reproduces sound via recording the noise and allowing it to be played back... that is an invention worthy of a patent. Thomas Edison clearly deserved kudos and the protection for coming up with that idea initially. Patents were intended to protect physical devices from being copied due to the difficulty in doing the engineering and the infrastructure necessary to get those devices produced in the first place, so the government was willing to grant a temporary (read TEMPORARY! ) monopoly over the concept to get the inventor of the idea established in the marketplace and recoup the R&D costs that the copy-cats wouldn't have to deal with. For most software patents, that is hardly the issue at all, and certainly isn't the case with business patents.