The patent was granted May 4th 2004 per the actual patent.
Reading the patent, I would think that suing Second Life would be a better match than suing MMO games. The patent refers to shared experiences and browsing. The website for the company, worlds.com, claims they launched in 1994, which predates most, if not all, MMOs. IANAL but, like others have noted, if MMOs can be sued by this patent, then all games that are not strictly single player offline games can be sued as well.
Another part of the equation that is being skipped over in this discussion is that a downloader will never receive the entire file from a single source unless there is only one seeder and one leacher. In common usage, there are several seeders and several leachers and any one leacher will get a different part of the file from all seeders and leachers, according to what is needed and available on each. Additionally, the seeders are most likely not the original uploader.
Then there is the matter of client configuration which allows a seeder to set a limit on the share ratio (most default 2:1). This makes the torrent unavailable after the equivalent amount of data has been uploaded twice (depending on settings). It may be that the seeder uploads only the same 100kb of the file over and over to several different people.
The law suits are assuming that the person caught is the original and sole source for any particular song, when in fact they likely got it from someone else and never uploaded in its entirety.
Slashdot Mirror
It was granted in February of '07
The patent was granted May 4th 2004 per the actual patent. Reading the patent, I would think that suing Second Life would be a better match than suing MMO games. The patent refers to shared experiences and browsing. The website for the company, worlds.com, claims they launched in 1994, which predates most, if not all, MMOs. IANAL but, like others have noted, if MMOs can be sued by this patent, then all games that are not strictly single player offline games can be sued as well.
RTFA
Another part of the equation that is being skipped over in this discussion is that a downloader will never receive the entire file from a single source unless there is only one seeder and one leacher. In common usage, there are several seeders and several leachers and any one leacher will get a different part of the file from all seeders and leachers, according to what is needed and available on each. Additionally, the seeders are most likely not the original uploader. Then there is the matter of client configuration which allows a seeder to set a limit on the share ratio (most default 2:1). This makes the torrent unavailable after the equivalent amount of data has been uploaded twice (depending on settings). It may be that the seeder uploads only the same 100kb of the file over and over to several different people. The law suits are assuming that the person caught is the original and sole source for any particular song, when in fact they likely got it from someone else and never uploaded in its entirety.