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Activision Blizzard Sued For Patent Infringement Over WoW, CoD

Posted by Soulskill on from the good-luck-with-that dept.

New submitter thunderdanp writes with news that a company called Worlds Inc. has filed a patent suit against Activision Blizzard, targeting World of Warcraft and the Call of Duty series. The patents in question describe a "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space." Worlds Inc. is quite glad that "their" technology has "helped the businesses of virtual worlds gaming and the sale of virtual goods to grow into a multibillion-dollar industry" — but now they want a cut.

32 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. First sentence of the first article by Roobles · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Worlds Inc. filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, Inc., Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. and Activision Publishing, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on March 30, 2012."

    1. Re:First sentence of the first article by Fned · · Score: 5, Funny

      Wow.

      They REALLY don't know what they're doing.

    2. Re:First sentence of the first article by ericloewe · · Score: 2

      Beginner's mistake. All trolls must file in the Eastern District of Texas.

    3. Re:First sentence of the first article by Grond · · Score: 4, Informative

      The law regarding venue has shifted in the past few years and it is now much harder to stay in the Eastern District of Texas, especially if both the plaintiff and defendant have only a nominal presence there (e.g. their products are sold there via the internet or they have a couple of retail outlets). In re Volkswagen of Am., Inc., 545 F.3d 304 (5th Cir. 2008); also see In re TS Tech. USA Corp., 551 F.3d 1315 (Fed. Cir. 2008); In re Genentech, Inc., 566 F.3d 1338 (Fed. Cir. 2009); In re Hoffmann-La Roche Inc., 587 F.3d 1333 (Fed. Cir. 2009); In re Nintendo Co., 589 F.3d 1194 (Fed. Cir. 2009); In re Zimmer Holdings, Inc., 609 F.3d 1378 (Fed. Cir. 2010); In re Acer Am. Corp., 626 F.3d 1252 (Fed. Cir. 2010); In re Microsoft Corp., 630 F.3d 1361 (Fed. Cir. 2011).

      Anyway, the Eastern District of Texas's reputation as a pro-patentee district is a little undeserved. The statistics on that aren't super strong. For example, here are the patentee win rates among various popular districts, taken from Andrei Iancu and Jay Chung, Real Reasons the Eastern District of Texas Draws Patent Cases—Beyond Lore and Anecdote, 14 SMU Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 299 (2011).

      District Jury Trial Win Rate
      E.D. Virginia 79%
      M.D. Florida 77%
      N.D. Illinois 74%
      E.D. Texas 73%
      C.D. California 73%
      W.D. Wisconsin 71%
      N.D. California 66%
      D. Minnesota 65%
      D. New Jersey 64%
      D.Delaware 61%
      S.D. New York 53%

      (NB: That's the jury trial win rate; less than 3% of patent cases end with a jury verdict, so don't think these stats show that patentees win patent cases left and right.)

      As you can see, the Eastern District of Texas is only a little above the average there. Its affirmance rate at the Federal Circuit is similarly middle-of-the-pack, and it's also not the fastest district by a long shot, with an average time to jury verdict of almost 29 months, compared to Eastern Virginia and Western Wisconsin with 12 and 13 month pendencies, respectively.

    4. Re:First sentence of the first article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      FWIW, the judge that made East Texas famous for it's patent rocket docket has retired (about 6 months ago). So not only is it not the patent-friendly court it used to be, but that particular judge no longer serves as well.

    5. Re:First sentence of the first article by SadButTrue · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Horrible statistical assumptions here. To compare success rates only, is to assume that the quality of the complaints in all districts had the same distribution. For the sake of argument lets say that 100% of the frivolous cases were filed in E. Texas and 0% in S. NY. You can plainly see that success rate alone would tell you nothing. I understand that this is not the case, the numbers are simply meant to illustrate the assumption being made.

      In real terms there is reason to believe that there is indeed a skew in the validity of the cases brought however. How much? I have no idea. Perhaps a better statistic would be the number or trials verdicts that have been overturned?

      --
      grape - the GNU free, open source rape
    6. Re:First sentence of the first article by Teancum · · Score: 2

      What happened was that the "modding" community around the original Alpha World ended up becoming more successful from a financial standpoint than the game/world itself. One of the companies that was producing content and providing stuff for players ended up buying out the company producing the main engine software, including all of the "intellectual property". Essentially the original development team really didn't know how to turn a profit out of the virtual world in spite of some pretty ambitious business goals.

      That said, I think after the buy-out, the "new management team" has done a pretty good job of managing the resources of the game and the move to "Active Worlds" was a pretty good move given everything that happened earlier including putting the finances of the whole enterprise on a sound financial standing. While they have stayed a niche player and Active Worlds certainly never became something like World of Warcraft, they have had a very steady presence on the internet for a couple of decades now.

      I spent perhaps far too much time in Alpha World myself and created not just a nice little McMansion, but I also ended up building a major subdivision in terms of laying out a huge grid network of roads and even started a "subway" system (actually an "elevated train" network) with several "stations". I loved the roller coasters but never got around to building one myself. Boy does this bring back memories.

      I remember the original "Alpha Station" that even predated the Alpha World itself, and they've done some amazing things over the years. While there might be some prior art, these guys were some of the very early pioneers of avatars and were some of the very first people who tried to implement VRML in a meaningful way. Keep in mind this was back in the days that NCSA Mosiac was still the dominant web browser on the internet. In fact I think I downloaded the original Alpha Station with Mosaic, or perhaps that was a Gopher client based upon a post I saw on USENET (before spam became a problem there as well). This goes way back in what is now called the early history of the internet.

      In terms of prior art, I would say that they are the prior art. The only question I have is if that prior art happened long enough ago for patent protection to even apply. At the time when the original software developers were making Alpha Station, they acknowledged the inspiration for their software from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It was so much of an inspiration that the Black Sun lounge was even built by some of the developers once Alpha World came out. So does Neal Stephenson get a cut of the profits from the lawsuit if they win?

    7. Re:First sentence of the first article by julesh · · Score: 2

      Doesn't matter. The technique described in the claims (essentially, a server that works out which other users a user's avatar is able to see and only sends position updates for those, with various variations - all of which are obvious - involving how the necessary information is to be stored in a database) is so fundamental, I find it highly unlikely that there was no prior art older than even that. The defendants should be looking at, for example, CitySpace, a networked virtual world system that was demonstrated in 1993. Failing that, any number of examples of similar behaviour in different fields could be used as a basis for an argument of obviousness.

  2. How did they get a patent... by Zakabog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How did they even get a patent for this? They basically described every multiplayer video game for the past 20 years.

    1. Re:How did they get a patent... by Faluzeer · · Score: 2

      Hmmm

      If you read the patent, you will see it refers to earlier patent applications on a related theme from them. The earliest patent application goes back to November 1995, hence it is prior art from before that date that needs to be taken into consideration.

    2. Re:How did they get a patent... by Dahamma · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's what I thought at first - but the submitter linked to the wrong patent(s). They have several dating all the way back to the mid 90's that at least predate any commercial 3D MMORPGs.

      Not saying they aren't stupid patents, but at the least they were not in fact stupid enough to try to sue their prior art...

    3. Re:How did they get a patent... by suutar · · Score: 2

      Looking at the first few claims, it looks like they basically took the concept and then started shaving off little bits to keep it from _quite_ matching anything they knew about. Basically an attempt to patent "this thing everybody's doing but only the pieces that nobody's done yet". Unless there's some interesting stuff in the later claims, I'd seriously question it on obviousness.

    4. Re:How did they get a patent... by jd · · Score: 4, Informative

      Everything but the 3D aspect was done in AberMUD (which used a 2D graphical interface in a dedicated client). Basic GUI-driven avatar-based multi-player interactions via specialized clients can be traced back to XTrek at least (XTank didn't use clients per-se, since the server transmitted X protocol commands to the client display), since avatars could directly interact and players could chat via a console.

      In terms of 3D interactions, Second Life was hardly the first. Alpha World was earlier and even that was derived from earlier attempts.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

      Aha! Yes, Worlds Inc was responsible for Alpha World. That makes sense, and certainly Alpha World has a legitimate claim to being the direct ancestor of WoW, etc, and the platform that developed all of the technology used by Second Life, ad nausium. It's a push for them to claim the sole rights to MMORG Virtual Realities, though.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    5. Re:How did they get a patent... by CaptainLugnuts · · Score: 2

      I'll raise you a decade. Midi Maze for the Atari ST in 1987. 3D Networked multi-player game using MIDI for data communiations.

    6. Re:How did they get a patent... by deblau · · Score: 2

      Because they filed the original application 16.5 years ago, when there wasn't so much prior art.

      This application is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/353,218 filed Jan. 13, 2009, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,945,856; which is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/591,878, filed Nov. 2, 2006, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,493,558; which is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/632,154, filed Aug. 3, 2000, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,181,690; which is a continuation of and claims priority from U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/747,420, filed Nov. 12, 1996, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,045; which claims priority from U.S. Provisional patent application Ser. No. 60/020,296, filed Nov. 13, 1995. The disclosures of all of the foregoing patent documents are incorporated herein by reference.

      --
      This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
  3. They still exist but in Ghost Form by Shikaku · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.worlds.com/

    It's mostly empty now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqel0k0NzNU has a short walk around of something before Second Life came around, and that still runs well on 56k.

  4. Re:Let me guess by Necroman · · Score: 2

    Nope, not in Eastern District of Texas. According to this article:

    Worlds Inc. filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, Inc., Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. and Activision Publishing, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on March 30, 2012.

    --
    Its not what it is, its something else.
  5. Prior Art by Nos9 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There is this obscure game called Everquest that does all of the described elements of the patents. Everquest released March 16th, 1999. The aforementioned patent was filed March 19th, 1999.

    1. Re:Prior Art by Fishbulb · · Score: 2

      Forget that, there's this obscure game called netrek that beats Everquest by about ten years. And if you're going to talk about multiple users in 'virtual space', that's pretty much all netrek is.

      Scratch that, beats it by 11 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek

    2. Re:Prior Art by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2

      Now that's a cool reference. The only thing lacking is a 3D avatar, but one can argue that the 3D avatar is an obvious extension to the core portion of the idea, and therefore this would be an invalid patent, otherwise anything 3-D could have been patented, back in at least 85 or so, and SGI would have owned just about all of them.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  6. They are already prepared to lose. by Jeng · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I see that they made a spinoff company to litigate with so that when they lose they don't lose the shirts off their back when they lose, which they will.

    --
    Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
  7. hunt by RichMan · · Score: 2

    really really ancient unix network multiplayer game

    ----
            The object of the game hunt is to kill off the other players. There are no rooms, no treasures, and no monsters.
            Instead, you wander around a maze, find grenades, trip mines, and shoot down walls and players. The more players
            you kill before you die, the better your score is. If the -m flag is given, you enter the game as a monitor (you
            can see the action but you cannot play).

            hunt normally looks for an active game on the local network; if none is found, it starts one up on the local host.
            The location of the game may be specified by giving the host argument. This presupposes that a hunt game is
            already running on that host, see huntd(6) for details on how to setup a game on a specific host. If more than one
            game if found, you may pick which game to play in.

            The symbols on the screen are:
                        -|+ walls /\ diagonal (deflecting) walls
                        # doors (dispersion walls)
                        ; small mine
                        g large mine
                        : bullet
                        o grenade
                        O satchel charge
                        @ bomb
                        s small slime
                        $ big slime
                        >^v you facing right, left, up, or down
                        }{i! other players facing right, left, up, or down
                        * explosion
                        \|/
                        -*- grenade and large mine explosion /|\

    ----
    chat was possible using other unix utilities so it was not part of the game

  8. A time limit needed by Grayhand · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's obvious that the lawsuits are ridiculous but what's most ridiculous is they are allowed to file after this many years. Usually there's a three year cut off. These companies, and some of them are the majors, sit back and let the totals add up until there are businesses valued in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to sue. It's a blatant way of preventing the offender from modifying their product to avoid being sued and to rack up as much damages as possible before filing. Some minor tweaks in WoW might have avoided the lawsuit so they sit quietly until the damages are massive then sue. Without reading the patents it's hard to say but some of their claims involve things that have been standard in gaming for more than 20 years. The biggest advance in WoW was faster computers and connections allowing multiple players to interact. Also how could it have "helped the businesses of virtual worlds gaming and the sale of virtual goods to grow into a multibillion-dollar industry" when the ones being sued were never aware of the patents in the first place. It's like patenting the wheel then keeping it to yourself then claiming the car companies stole your design.

    1. Re:A time limit needed by geekoid · · Score: 2

      sigh. I wish people wuiold make an effort tounderstand the things they complain about.

      This is a continuous patent. It goes back to 1995

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application

      Please try to understand the basic concepts of things you don't like.
      Anyone who doesn't do that is hating something based on a 'gut feeling'' which is useless.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  9. statute of limitations by Eponymous+Hero · · Score: 2

    you should have a relatively short time limit to recognize your patent being used without permission and sue for it. waiting to see which business became profitable off you should invalidate your claim.

    --
    insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
  10. In 2008 they sued NC soft, and NCsoft settled. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/04/27/worlds-com-vs-ncsoft-lawsuit-settled/

    from the article:
    "Worlds.com president and sole full-time employee Thomas Kidrin has simply exhausted his resources. Kidrin was recently quoted as saying "if we do not develop any new projects, we would have to severely diminish our operations or halt them entirely,"

    1. Re:In 2008 they sued NC soft, and NCsoft settled. by Kalriath · · Score: 2

      I love how he's the sole full time employee, and still says "we" and "our".

      --
      For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
  11. Worlds Inc. is nothing but legal zombie, no IP... by kbonin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Those of us who worked and actually innovated in VR in the late 80s and early 90s have always been a little worried about Worlds, as they liked to run off to the patent office with all the ideas the collected from the rest of us. All of their patent claims existed in other products - even their first patents were an attempt to claim basic VR tech shown several years before by several groups, including the one I worked with (OnLive Traveler). There is plenty of prior art to invalidate these patents, but in our glorious patent system it will cost millions to do so. And like SCO, their legal zombie remains keep trying to extend old claims and collect something for the little invalid patent portfolio that was passed on when they shut down. The software patent apocalypse continues....

  12. Re:Worlds Inc. is nothing but legal zombie, no IP. by Grond · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is plenty of prior art to invalidate these patents, but in our glorious patent system it will cost millions to do so.

    Requesting an ex parte reexamination costs $2,520, plus a fairly modest amount for a patent attorney to put together the request. The Patent Office takes it from there, and any litigation is typically stayed pending the result. Worlds' patent portfolio appears to be pretty small, only five patents, so all five could be thrown into reexam for not a lot of money. For a more hands-on approach there's inter partes reexamination, though it is a bit more expensive, but still cheaper than litigation. Litigation is not the only way to address a potentially invalid patent, depending on the defenses one plans to raise (i.e. not all possible defenses are available in reexamination).

  13. Re:1970s by realityimpaired · · Score: 2

    Here's the thing... here I was hoping to shoot it down with prior art, mentioning stuff like DikuMUD, and such.... then I checked the patent and realized that it was filed in 2009.

    WoW had already been on the market for several years by that point....

  14. Priority date: 1995 by tepples · · Score: 2

    it was filed in 2009

    The patent "claims priority from U.S. Provisional patent application Ser. No. 60/020,296, filed Nov. 13, 1995".

  15. Server-side PVS determination by tepples · · Score: 2

    The key part of the first claim, as I understand it, is server-side determination of which other avatars a given player is allowed to see: "wherein the client device does not receive position information of at least some avatars that fail to satisfy a participant condition imposed on avatars displayable on a client device display of the client device". For example, the server might hide other players that are too far away or players on the opposing team that are hidden behind walls.