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Major MMO Publishers Sued For Patent Infringement

Posted by Soulskill on from the prior-what-now dept.

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."

2 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My first thought by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Back when I was doing my PhD, I (together with a friend) wrote a networked game called Xanadu (Xanadu - A New Adventure Dungeon Underground was the rather strained recursive acronym) for X workstations. We even connected across London from different colleges to the same server running on my Decstation 3100. That was in 1991, which seems to handily predate these patents. I still have a backup CDROM of the source code alongside all of my other (thesis) code ...

    I remember pulling all-nighters in college, and I specifically remember the first time we successfully connected using the commandline client and moved a character from X,Y to X,Y+1, thus validating the movement routines - there were a lot of firsts for us back in that code: socket programming (thankyou Stevens), bitfields in structures, function pointer tables, etc. To see it all work at 3:00 am was a major high. Kid's stuff today, of course :)

    Anyway, much as I'd love to think of myself as a prodigy, it seems this patent falls afoul of the obvious clause, and if blizzard or whomever want to get in touch for some patent-busting source code, just feel free :)

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  2. Re:My first thought by meerling · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I agree with you, it looks very weak to me. As I understood it when I was a child, the universities and such dealing with virtual environments (3d worlds) obviously wanted multiple users to share the same environment and experience the events/occurrences at the same time, just like in the real world.
    It seems to me that this patent completely fails the obviousness test with MMOs are VR Worlds.
    Here's hoping the judge smacks them down.