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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."
I'm tired and going to bed but a quick Google netted patent 5822523. http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5822523
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
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....
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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.
Patent 5822523, summarised:
The number of communications required to keep a game with N players updated with each other is O(N!). This patent suggests a method by which the communications are sent to a central server, with the server sending regular updates to each player of all the actions taken by the other N-1 players. The server includes the ability for clients to become part of a "group" which further limits the amount of communication required to something less than O(N). The patent attempts to claim the Nagle algorithm as a unique invention (ie: hold on to outgoing messages for a short time to potentially squeeze more data into one packet).
"Group" in this context would be similar to "instance" in World of Warcraft or "grid" in EVE Online.
If someone can explain how this is not an obvious solution to the problem, as evidenced by the parallel development of this technology by every MMO out there, I'd love to hear it.
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
If you read through the patent, it's basically the same as a mailing list that sends out digests. Trivial.
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!
And in a good example of previous art, MANY years ago, I used a chat program called "powwow" (yes, created by the Native American community), that not only allowed group interactions, but, had shared games, and the ability to surf the Net as a group (one URL click would take the entire group to that website) and many other group interactions.
Since this pedated paltalk, I suspect that the awards should go someplace BESIDES into their pocket.
here are some comments about Powwow....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paltalk
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Since this pedated paltalk, [...]
Pedated?
Did it molest paltalk when it was young?
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.
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.
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.
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 other hand, an online game where none of the players would share the same environment would be more challenging !
- So shall we conquer the castle ? You have flaming arrows, right ?
- I'm feeding my pink ponies
- What space station is that castle on again ?
- Has anybody got spare rifle grenades ?
- Wait, we have to act in sync
- Ooops, gotta go, the unicorn is here !
- wait, what ?
- I think a castle just floated by
- floated ? Wait, where are you ?
- It's behind that large asteroid !
- Never mind about the grenades, I found a RPG, let's go !
- Ok, let's pause for a moment, this doesn't make sense
- They have fighters in orbit ! I'm on it !
- I'll cover you with the RPG !
- I'm so going back to Wow...
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Made from the freshest electrons.
If you read through the patent, it's basically the same as a mailing list that sends out digests. Trivial.
Actually, it's not *basically* the same. It's *exactly* the same. Almost every claim has prior art in standard mailing list management software that has existed practically forever.
I was thinking IRC + Nagle's algorithm as prior art, but I think you've hit the nail on the head there!
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.
All Software patents are obvious on some level. I still think software shouldn't be patentable, only copyrightable.
I'm a developer, and I still feel as though writing a program is similar to writing a book in that regard. If you allowed publishers to patent ideas for books and methods for main characters to traverse through the story, you'd basically hit the same point we are in software patents. Dragons would be patented to someone, Mystery Novels would be patented to someone else...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.