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Zynga and Blizzard Sued Over Game Patent
eldavojohn writes "Thinking about developing a game involving a 'database driven online distributed tournament system?' Well, you had better talk to Walker Digital or risk a lawsuit, because Walker Digital claims to have patented that 'invention' back in 2002. The patent in question has resulted in some legal matters for the makers of 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 and 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: World at War, Blur, Wolfenstein, DJ Hero 2, Golden Eye 007, World of Warcraft and its expansions, Mafia Wars, and many others.' Walker Digital (parent company of Priceline.com) said it's not sure how much damages are going to be, and requested that through discovery in the court. If you think Walker Digital is not a patent troll, check out their lawsuit from two months ago against Facebook for using privacy controls Walker Digital claims to have patented. It would seem that any online competitive game that uses a database to select and reward contestants in a tournament could potentially fall under this patent — of course, those with the deepest coffers will be cherrypicked first."
Software patents confuse the hell out of me. I mean, reading the patent abstract, it sounds like it could apply to any of thousands of database driven multiplayer tournament systems (games).
Case in point: I write database driven business applications, and is essentially just reading + writing data, similar to the abstract. Objects have statuses (scores) which pivot around a status hierarchy (levels) which determines if an object can move to the next level (game progression). Certain actions and events are even restricted by the ownership of certain properties and items (inventory/magic items/stats). This abstract could apply to many different softwares.
It pisses me off how this abstract reads just like it's own name. I wonder if it was filed by drunk 5-year olds...
Blizzard really don't have to go far for prior art on this at all. Starcraft 1 had a system that was essentially the same as Starcraft 2's ladder system. You could choose to play a match in the Blizzard ladder system and you'd be ranked and the results stored on the Blizzard database server. The Starcraft 1 ladder was removed in later patches as no one was using it towards the end (they were playing on other custom laddering systems) but it was there in the beginning and it was very similar to what's in Starcraft 2.
It's actually quite funny that they've chosen to sue the one company that has the most prior art on this.
Diablo2 and Battle.net may well cover this more than completely
If I were the judge presiding over this case, the first thing I'd do is ask Walker Digital to explain why it took eight years before they decided to start suing publishers/developers, despite there being a number of games released earlier which supposedly infringed on their patent. If they couldn't reasonably explain the delay in such a way as to allay my suspicious that they simply wanted to hold off litigation until they had a lot of guys to go after for maximum returns, I'd tell them (in legal speak of course) to fuck off.
But I am no lawyer of course, and I have no idea if it would be as simple as that.
MUD Essex University 1978-1987ish - kept a record of your level (thus a database), being rewarded with increased abilities every level until you got to Witch/Wizard level, and allowed remote play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/ecsjun84.htm
Obviously it depends on exactly how the claims of the patent are phrased, but from the abstract it would appear that this constitutes substantial prior art nearly 20 years before the 2001 filing date.
A quick look at some of the claims show it would probably be prior art against some of them. The game stored level and sex, (claims 1-2), it was a game of skill (claim 3). Claims 8,9,10 appear to be fairly generic method of interacting with any remote game, leaving only the association of payment with the game. I'm sure online games needing payment were present in the 80's too
In summary, the patent appears to have been awarded for something that is obvious and where prior art already exists
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
And this is the problem with even doing business in a country that allows such abstract "patents", especially software patents. You don't need to be in the patent business, or invention, or even be in an area where you expect to have to research patents for running a business, and you don't even need to actually violate any valid patent - you can still sued out of existence if you're not big enough to fend such things off.
It's not the "yet-another-big-company-sued-for-obviousness" stories that are the problem - how many tiny little outfits just settled out of court instead of fight something they *know* they should win? You don't point at Google first, you take lots of small companies and get their settlements in order to provide you with some authenticity and then go for the big boys, and you'll never hear about those small-fry that feel they have to pay up because it's too costly for them to annoy the patent-holders or defend against them in court.
Seriously - stop doing business in places that have software patents. It's a gamble that is going to cost you big if you are unlucky enough to step on a patent-troll's foot. I hereby patent "method to determine if a user of a game is in a country subject to software patent laws for the purpose of denial of access to such users", by the way.
This is like a patent troll in quest greens going up against the Blizzard boss.
I wonder if anyone has tried or even contemplated suing the Patent Office for awarding overly broad and obvious patents. There would not be so much trouble if the Patent Office actually did their job and denied these kinds of patents.
Nobody forces you to play a game. Zynga have made a lot of money by giving people games that they voluntarily want to play and, in some cases, buy. Just because it's not *your* (or my) type of game, doesn't mean they are somehow inherently the antithesis of gaming. I don't understand people that pay monthly subscriptions to play crappy click-fest MMORPG's just to get to the next "virtual" level but it's hard to say that they are the "bane" of gaming.
I spent a small fortune on Steam over Christmas, on an already bursting-at-the-seams account. I got 75 new games for less than the price of a Wii. Do you know what I ended up playing the most (without intending to) and what I ended up gifting to friends who also wouldn't get off it? Flight Control HD. It's a flash-like game where you draw flight-paths for cartoon planes to have them land at their relevant airport runway without hitting each other. I could write it in a few hours in any programming language that lets you manipulate pixels or draw bitmaps. Thing is, I have extracted more gaming value from that than expensive, new, 3D, top-range FPS with advanced physics, realistic graphics and online gaming. If you go by hours-of-entertainment-per-price, it rates extremely highly. My previous big-value-purchase? Altitude. Fly a little 2D plane around while shooting other people doing the same. (And no, I'm not plane-obsessed in any way - they just happen to both be fun games). It cost me £3 and I've played 200+ hours and even set up my own server for it. Grand Theft Auto IV? I got it on the Steam Christmas sales because it worked out to be about 3 pounds, but even GTA 3 was only 10-15 hours of play for me and cost about £30 at the time (I didn't even buy GTA 3, someone else gifted it to me). I haven't even bothered to download it yet - I'll leave it until I'm bored of the other 74 games I bought this Christmas and have nothing else to play. There are *very* few big name, "complex" games that can give me value anywhere near a little mess-around game. And if that value is present, even when I *can* see it (e.g. Half-Life 2 when it first came out) it has to work REALLY hard to get me to part with my money.
I don't think I played any Zygna titles except for Farmville and that was mostly to see what the fuss was about (I was late to Facebook but eventually succumbed to using it as an online photo gallery, and - mainly to prove a point - in a week of playing Farmville for free for 10 minutes a day I had something valued about 10 times what my closest "obsessive" friends had managed in years with their DLC purchases... it was just a matter of seeing what provided the greatest return on investment without actually spending *real* money to buy things). I don't play their games, I find them a bit too simplistic and boring and aimed towards making profit. But hell, I've played many more worse games that cost lots of *real* money.
Zygna are making money from people who are willingly parting with cash and giving it to them rather than to companies like Valve - there's a reason for that. Without Zygna, they *wouldn't* be giving their money to Valve or other high-end-gaming producers anyway. They haven't *ruined* gaming, they've just found a niche that most people who consider themselves serious gamers (if ever there was a contradiction in terms, that's it) don't like. Good luck to them - they aren't hurting anyone. But if they could stop everyone else from spamming my Facebook page with crap by default, that would be nice too.
It pisses me off how this abstract reads just like it's own name.
It goes even deeper than that. Here's a game called "Patent". Players submit a description of something obvious and already existing to a database drive online tournament. If they get in first before other players they are rewarded with points which allows them to submit more descriptions of something obvious and already existing. If they don't get their patent into the tournament first, they lose points to other players. The winner is the one to first manage to patent the idea of the universe and everything it contains.
Clearly Walker Digital have patented the concept of the game "Patents", and the patent office has breached that patent. Patents issued by the US patent Office are therefore invalid, including Walker Digital's patent. The who shebang disappears up its own fundamental and can be ignored by everyone of any sense.
Claim 1-3 cover all client server games with persistent data.
The oldest such game I know of is from 1971, but I'm sure there are examples predates that.
Claim 4-5 adds payment to that. That was not common on the early internet, but common on the for payment BBS's of the 80's.
Claim 6-7 adds "prizes" to the first claim, without defining the term. It would seem to cover any client-server game with a high-score
Claim 8-10 add a physical computer to the above claims: "No sir, this is not a software patent, it is a patent on software running on a computer. Totally different. Down with software patents!".
If you look at the cover of the patent, it tells you that it claims benefit of an earlier effective filing date as a continuation of another application. A continuation means that the same specification is filed - so they're disclosing all the same stuff to the public - but they're rewording the claims, ostensibly to cover some other aspect of the disclosed invention.
One possible defense is to show that the new claims lack written description support in the parent application, which would make those claims not eligible to get the benefit of the earlier filing date. Then you show that there is intervening prior art rendering the claim anticipated or obvious. This is more commonplace in the case of continuations-in-part, where some stuff gets added to the new filing, and the claims often capture some element of the new material.