Activision Sued Over Online Multiplayer in Call of Duty, WoW

[2733]

If that's possible, I'm gonna go patent the air.

I call dibs on the ground. So, maybe you and I don't pay each other?

Just one step closer to world domination! HAHAHA!

Well, I guess I'll patent matter and energy then...

We shall name ourselves... The Evil League of Evil! It will be glorious!

I'm going to patent "Evil Patent Based Schemes"

 

[alandavidson]

The thing is that most of the people who work in the patent office either don't care, or don't understand the medium that they are running a patent on. If something doesn't have the exact same verbage as something else, it will be run through.

Depending on the time the patents were filed, the courts should rule the cases invalid because it was already a "common and pre-existing medium", aka, they didn't come up with it.

 

[metal mustache]

and this is why i voted for communism.

 

[Zipa]

I hope activision crush these greedy arseholes.

 

[tzimize]

It really seems to be a good time to start thinking about writing up laws against Patent Trolling like this, because these are so generic as to be useless for any actual applications and are designed only for use in lawsuits.

There is such a simple way of getting rid of this. If lawsuits are as stupid as this seems to be, why not fine the guys starting the lawsuit with an astronomical sum? Enough to make them bankrupt?

Its the same principle as cutting of a hand for thievery, just with money.

 

[Plurralbles]

digital patents are such bullshit.

 

[Okysho]

online FPSs and many MMOs aren't tournaments... I don't see the validity in this argument. Unless it's actually a CoD BlOps tournament or something. No one is competeing in an MMO anyway unless they're scheduled PvPs or something....

 

[technoted]

Didn't Blizzard start doing online tournements in the 90's about 4 years before these guys patented "Online tournements"?

 

[mjc0961]

Patent trolls, nothing more. There should be laws to stop this nonsense.

 

[felixader]

All Activision has to say is that their games don't support in-game online tournaments on their own and, boom, lawsuit invalidated.

Edit: At least tournament in the general, commonly used sense.

I think what they mean is matchmaking.

Or they try to make it so that they sue them cause people can make tournaments trough their games.

However it's bullshit.

 

[creothes]

going up against blizz. they just dug there own graves

 

[SnootyEnglishman]

Someone must need some coke and hooker money.

 

[Fearzone]

I doubt the folks at Blizzard or Activision are losing any sleep.

 

[Mechsoap]

Dont Zynga, Activision, and Blizzard have like a thousand, well trained lawyers at hand?

 

[Netrigan]

I feel John Carmack said it best:

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.

Seriously, I'm no fan of Activision, but this is just stupid.

The Carmack quote is interesting, because if anyone has the right to file a lawsuit like this, it's probably him, not some johnny-come-lately who said he did it years later in 2002.

Quake was released in 1996 and shortly after Carmack perfected the internet code for it with Quakeworld. Global ranking was in place by 1997.

I'm wondering what the fuck this guy is claiming to have invented in 2002.

 

[Starke]

Well, I patent the sun!

somebody did that already:
http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpps/news/offbeat/spanish-woman-claims-she-now-owns-sun-dpgonc-20101126-gc_10808147

and there should be a law against patenting things that are already in use. that is just ridiculous. i should patent gardening or figure skating.

It's already an element of patent law, called "prior art". If someone did it before you filed you're shit out of luck.

Actually, the US is first-to-invent, so if you were working on it before someone else and you carried it through to patent, you're good.

I believe the technical term is still "prior art" (which was probably borrowed from copyright law,) but either way, different names, same concept.

 

[Starke]

I feel John Carmack said it best:

The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.

Seriously, I'm no fan of Activision, but this is just stupid.

The Carmack quote is interesting, because if anyone has the right to file a lawsuit like this, it's probably him, not some johnny-come-lately who said he did it years later in 2002.

Quake was released in 1996 and shortly after Carmack perfected the internet code for it with Quakeworld. Global ranking was in place by 1997.

I'm wondering what the fuck this guy is claiming to have invented in 2002.

I'm pretty sure Quake wouldn't satisfy it because gameplay wasn't running through the central servers. Unless Quakeworld was a dedicated server, itself (I really do not remember). That seems to be an element of the filing. That said, I haven't read the filing, just the one off phrase here, so I could be mistaken. Either way, DAoC does satisfy the requirements, as far as I can tell, and battle.net may as well.

 

[Starke]

Didn't Blizzard start doing online tournements in the 90's about 4 years before these guys patented "Online tournements"?

It looks like the first tournaments were actually on Korean MMOs back in the mid-90s, but I'll admit, I haven't dug too deeply.

Patent trolls, nothing more. There should be laws to stop this nonsense.

There are. Intentionally filing frivolous suits can land you in hot water. Filing a patent in bad faith can land you in hot water. Neither one is going to send you away to prison, but you can certainly be fined.

 

[sdfasdfhfgfgjtyisdgdfdfj]

A good sign to show that not everybody has the cognitive capacity to keep up with today's technological rapid advancement.

 

[Azhrarn-101]

There is such a simple way of getting rid of this. If lawsuits are as stupid as this seems to be, why not fine the guys starting the lawsuit with an astronomical sum? Enough to make them bankrupt?

Its the same principle as cutting of a hand for thievery, just with money.

Oh, that is the sort of measure I was thinking of, since preventing silly patents from being filed would be next to impossible, especially since they're usually years old by the time they're used for trolling.