Activision Sued Over Online Multiplayer in Call of Duty, WoW
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
- Start date
Carlston said:
To continue to play Devil's Advocate, even if I don't care for this suit myself:
Well, look at this from another direction. Your a science fiction author and you predict technology a step or two ahead of what you have now. People call you insane, but you decide to take your idea and the theory of how it could work and file a patent on it because your sure that's where things are going. Then some company comes along and does exactly what you are talking about, despite it just being called "crazy" a couple of years ago. Maybe they were even inspired by YOUR ideas. You are of course going to want a cut of your own creation, which is why you filed the patent.
Of course big companies are going to say "well, we didn't violate his patent, we instead are just doing what we have always done, look at this pre-existing technology". People that use the products of those big companies are of course going to not want those companies to be driven out of business under any circumstances. This type of thing is rarely straightforward, so big companies usually have a huge advantage in fighting such battles legally.
Like it or not, we've seen competitive multiplayer-gaming come a long way in just the last few years. It's not unreasonable that someone might have beaten the big companies to the punch in what the next step of improving it is. It's also not unthinkable that the guys whose job it is to come up with new ideas to improve products, stole from someone else. The simplist seeming improvements to current technologies are oftentimes the hardest to come up with, even if they seem obvious in hindsight.
To put things into further perspective (for those who might have read this far), if you head onto a gaming forum and talk about multiplayer games, 20,000 differant people are liable to have 20,000 differant ideas on how they could do things better, or should have done things instead. Of course very few of those people ever patent their ideas. In this case someone in the previous generations of online multiplayer made a guess about how it was going to work, and was so sure of the development, that he filed a patent on the idea, and in this case he wound up being right (or so he will argue).
What's more with little information on this case, we don't know the entire story. If that patent holder had say sent a letter explaining his idea/patent to Activision/Blizzard, been told "buzz off, we're not interested" and then saw them develop the idea that he proposed to them without giving him his due credit/share, well that's a big deal too. We don't know the guy's entire story at this point.
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Also for those guys who are commenting about the whole "Edge" thing, that wasn't a patent, it was copyright. Basically what happened there was that someone figured a time would come when people would want to use that word in the context of a game being boundry pushing and radical. As a result, he took out a copyright on that word within specific contexts, and even produced a few weak properties to justify the hold. Kind of stupid and unreasonable, but legally speaking he did have a case. I'm glad he lost, but I'm not entirely sure the laws functioned as intended there.
What Tim did was more akin to "cybersquatting" than actual copyright trolling, and I believe it's those precedents that actually got him. Cybersquatting being when you buy the rights to a domain name you figure other people will want, so you can sell it to them for more than you paid. For example noticing that a well known company is not online yet, so you buy out domains/addreses in every reasonable variation of that company's name you can to try and force them to pay you tons of money to use their own name and create a site people looking for them will actually find. That's pretty obnoxious and a lot of things have been done to stop it, but I confess to some concern that bigger problems have been unleashed because of it.
In the case of a patent though it's a bit differant because the patent is on something that can result in an actual, physical product, rather than in regards to a purely intellectual property. Some things however can fall in both catagories though.
Got through the first page without even a single mention of the last time something like this happened. Am surprised.
Wow! Who knew patenting something was so easy? I'm gonna go draw a picture of a stick figure jumping around in goggles so I can patent VR!
Her claim of ownership of the sun totally discards an entire section of the space laws in place.treeboy027 said:
A quick glance at the spacelaw FAQ clearly states that it's impossible.
Link: [link]http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/oosa/en/FAQ/splawfaq.html[/link]
Also, your patents of the sun or stomachs could very be easily challenged in courts of pretty much every country where you apply the patent, under the provision that you didn't actually create anything. The sun and the stomachs were already there before you applied the patent, and you can't actually create anything new with it.
Given that battle.net (which is owner by blizzard) was released in 1997 and it meets this as well I think they could successfully argue prior art... Good lord I hate patent trolls
That has to be unconstitutional or something. To patent a liesure event? How about this, I am going to patent system link tournements, so if you want to have one with some friends, you have to pay me millions of dollars just for 4 hours of fun. I say we boycott this company. They aren't even involved in games or social networking!
That or say it was the gamers exersizing their 9th ammendment right.
It CAN'T be legal to patent stuff like that. How about I patent the universe, everytime you do something in it, I get to sue you.
That or say it was the gamers exersizing their 9th ammendment right.
It CAN'T be legal to patent stuff like that. How about I patent the universe, everytime you do something in it, I get to sue you.
how do you patent online game tournaments? that jsut sounds stupid to me.
i thought that one rule for a patent to be approved was non obviousness and this patent sounds very obvious to me since isnt this how only games ahve been for 100s of years so how is the patent even issued in 2002?
i thought that one rule for a patent to be approved was non obviousness and this patent sounds very obvious to me since isnt this how only games ahve been for 100s of years so how is the patent even issued in 2002?
I lol'd. That would be an awesome patent indeed.Fetzenfisch said:
OT: Well. Isn't that silly. I can't see this ending well for Walker Digital. Maybe Activision can counter-sue for "being an troll".
Yes, an troll.
According to Wiki, "Walker Digital creates companies that can exploit the patent system for profit.".
Hm. Experienced trolls at work here....