Worlds.com files suit against NCSoft-everyother mmop company to follow?

LanaLeasion - Lost City

Found this on gaia.. thought it might be interesting to you guys to read, Think theres really a chance it will hold up in court? What do you expect? PW to get a lawsuit next?

90's virtual world developers Worlds.com has fired the first shot in what could be a game company-spanning battle as they file suit against NCsoft for infringing on their patent for multiplayer virtual environments.

The patent at question is 7,181,690, "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space", which was file in August of 2000 and finally issued in February of last year. Reading over the patent, it basically covers the client/server-based system every single MMO on the market uses to allow multiple players to view and interact with each other in a virtual world. The suit, filed on Christmas Eve, claims that NCsoft has infringed on this patent across all of its MMO titles, from City of Heroes to Guild Wars to Dungeon Runners. After reading over the patent, it looks like they've actually got a pretty solid case on their hands.

Worlds seeks damages from NCsoft, as well as assurances that the MMO publisher will not infringe on their second patent, 6,219,045 - "Scalable Virtual World Chat Client-Server System".

Mark my words here - NCsoft is just the beginning. Their patent pretty much covers every instance where users with avatars interact in a virtual space. From Second Life to World of Warcraft, PlayStation Home to Anarchy Online; everything massively online and multiplayer falls under this patent. This should be interesting, folks.

Malibu - Heavens Tear

http://www.google.com/patents?id=wv5-AAAAEBAJ&dq=7,181,690

Yea, It will probably hold up if it goes to court and they go by filing date of the patent rather then the issue date.. Kinda curious to see what happens..

gattsuru

Those patents are amazingly wide, describe fairly obvious applications, without being novel. Patent 7,181,690 in particular seems to have been filed after EverQuest had already been released to the public, which makes it potentially open to a variety of prior art attacks. The other patent... Worlds.com was early on the scene, but the basic technology didn't spring fully-formed from a worlds.com's engineer's forehead. Meridian:59 might be prior art for it.

Unfortunately, there are a number of things helping them. They've actually been granted the patents. That doesn't mean much in the United States -- there are patents for perpetual motion machines or drunkenly scrawled teleportation rituals out there -- but it does mean a court is going to give Worlds.com a good deal more respect on the matter. They've got a lot of money, and relatively little to lose.

Worlds.com's actions are... not pretty. That shows that they're not confident in their position, and they shouldn't be. People with a suit they know they can win don't file the day before Christmas, claim willful infringement (which leads to much higher damages but is near impossible to prove), or try to rush things in Eastern Texas, or aim for a foreign company.

I'm not sure NCsoft has the capital to defend itself well. I'm not a fan of the company, but they've had some really bad luck (read:marketing and management) recently while simultaneously putting a lot of their money into development. Defending against patent infringement accusations can cost a lot of cash, and getting it back afterwards isn't always a given.

LanaLeasion - Lost City

gattsuru wrote: »

Those patents are amazingly wide, describe fairly obvious applications, without being novel. Patent 7,181,690 in particular seems to have been filed after EverQuest had already been released to the public, which makes it potentially open to a variety of prior art attacks. The other patent... Worlds.com was early on the scene, but the basic technology didn't spring fully-formed from a worlds.com's engineer's forehead. Meridian:59 might be prior art for it.

Unfortunately, there are a number of things helping them. They've actually been granted the patents. That doesn't mean much in the United States -- there are patents for perpetual motion machines or drunkenly scrawled teleportation rituals out there -- but it does mean a court is going to give Worlds.com a good deal more respect on the matter. They've got a lot of money, and relatively little to lose.

Worlds.com's actions are... not pretty. That shows that they're not confident in their position, and they shouldn't be. People with a suit they know they can win don't file the day before Christmas, claim willful infringement (which leads to much higher damages but is near impossible to prove), or try to rush things in Eastern Texas, or aim for a foreign company.

I'm not sure NCsoft has the capital to defend itself well. I'm not a fan of the company, but they've had some really bad luck (read:marketing and management) recently while simultaneously putting a lot of their money into development. Defending against patent infringement accusations can cost a lot of cash, and getting it back afterwards isn't always a given.

so with how wide the patent is.. theres really no chance it will hold up in court and spread to the other mmo companies right? or am i mixed up there? xD

cybermesh

They chose NCSoft for two reasons- it 1. is foreign and 2. doesn't have a lot of cash. They just want to set a precedent so they'll have a basis for attacking WoW.

Regarding the source material, those patents are absurdly vague and if anything does hold up in court I'm going to be ashamed of our legal system.

gattsuru

{Disclaimer : I am not a lawyer, nevermind a patent lawyer. Patent law is also confusing (and oft-contradictory).}

The intra-server chat system used by NCSoft makes them a little more vulnerable than most, as well, and I expect that and the financing is what made them the most attractive targets.

The issue isn't that the patent is vague. It is, like most patents, absurdly precise. The issue is that it's patenting the MMO equivalent of eyeballs and eardrums, core technology for a lot of people. It has a wide application base.

Patent law doesn't care one way or the other about that, though; you could patent an entire genre of computer games if you managed to keep the other aspects. Constitutionally, patents can be awarded "limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", full stop, which allows nearly everything. The courts and legislature have established further limits, though, specifically : the invention or discovery must not be obvious, must be novel, there must be a use for the patent's topic, and the subject must be patentable.

Only some subjects are Patentable. You can not patent a perpetual motion machine (although some get accidentally accepted every few years), or a work of art, or a book. Most mathemical algorithms are not patentable, with a few very eccentric exceptions. Generally, physical substances, chemical formulas, devices, and processes are patentable. Unfortunately, this is describing a process, so the subject is at least patentable, even if the individual process probably shouldn't be.

Utility is the easiest to prove, and anything worth scuffling over is usually useful. Not to mention the hundreds of dollars of application fees, even if you put the patent in yourself... Anyway, the technology can be used in a valuable program, so it's worth something.

Novelty means that the invention or discovery must not have been previously made available at a core level to the public, have been published, or described in another ealier patent. You can also lose the novelty test (in the US) if someone else already has the same thing out there. With Meridian 59 (first 'real' 3D MMO that I can remember fitting the criteria of the patents) not making it to the public until the mid-1995 range, and one of the Worlds.com patents dating back to then, they'll probably be considered novel. Novelty is a test with wide gray areas, though, so it's possible that the 1993 Doom game would be considered similar enough to violate novelty.

Note that the United States is a "first-to-invent" country, and nearly the last one. This makes prior art -- similar or identical inventions pushed out before the individual seeking a patent "reduced to practice" their discovery or invention -- even more important than in first-to-file countries. If you go into a job in a biochem field, you'll see people filling out and date/timestamping notes daily if not hourly; being five minutes earlier to see the chemical floating in a jar matters in the US.

The Obviousness test is the hard one. If the process described in a patent application isn't an invention or discovery, there can be no patent. You can't invent or discovery something that everyone else knows about, even if none of them make an application out of it or document it. But this is a nasty gray area that judges haven't defined too well.

The real question is whether a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) would solve the problem addressed by the patent in exactly the same manner. I've personally programmed a very similar process in a 2D game, and I'm not especially skilled in the art of programming or encouraged to read patents... but that's not what the PHOSITA tests usually work off of. The PHOSITA test doesn't really care if you can violate a patent without knowing of it, but if it's logical to do so.

The test works off what prior art was in public hands, and what (if any) suggestions or teachings to further improve future works were publically accessible. That might not seem to make a lot of sense, but it's an attempt to avoid the lens of hindsight from biasing judges and juries.

Yes, that's right, juries. Patent violations are an expensive civil law matter, and that means juries. You get a wide variety of peers, which at least better than the goofy post-Daubert 'expert witness' idiocy or elitism, but jury selection can be... problematic.

I'm pretty sure that the 6,219,045 patent shouldn't be upheld thanks to Doom, Meridian 59, and other multiplayer games. 7,181,690 should go up like an oily rag, since it postdates even Everquest. I'm not pretty sure I'd be comfortable explaining the tech to someone without a decent understanding of the OSI model, and I'm really not sure NCSoft could explain it or afford to hire someone that can.

I should also add that there's a very simple way to dig around these patents: both only apply for server processes where avatar positions are selected for transmission based on distance from the user avatar's location and an exception flag, up to a value of maximum displayable avatars for the client. Simply adding complexity doesn't let you avoid the patents, but switching to a different manner (line-of-sight, distance with no maximum displayable avatar count, action priority, anything else) would. Some client-server-client games would also get off scot free.

bobzilla21

You should totally be a lawyer.
I fell asleep halfway through.b:laugh

Rondor - Sanctuary

^^
Agreed!

ScorpiaV - Heavens Tear

well thats totally confusing.... b:surrender

Stickygreen - Heavens Tear

gatt, i just read both your posts... i find this lol. people suing over MMO's. lol, you know whats funny? the family of that chinese kid that died because he wanted to be with his "hereos" in WoW, didnt even sue Blizzard.

Zethanal - Heavens Tear

I think many games are doing this because they know that there MMORPG suck without guidance of NC... Jagex on the other hand wants to do it differently and focus more on Online security... Maybe one day, NCSoft will buy ALL the MMORPG companies except Jagex.

Fleuri - Sanctuary

gattsuru wrote: »

The intra-server chat system used by NCSoft makes them a little more vulnerable than most, as well, and I expect that and the financing is what made them the most attractive targets.

I wonder if NCSoft could find somebody that has heard of IRC to testify in court for them. Do you think that would help?

And perhaps they should also find themselves a high school math teacher, to explain how concepts relating to algebra and geometry have actually been known for some time?