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

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..

{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.

^^
Agreed!

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.

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?