World of Warcraft and Second Life are next, says Worlds.com CEO

by Tateru Nino Mar 12th 2009 at 10:00AM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, MMO industry, News items, Second Life, Legal, Virtual worlds

As you are probably already well aware, virtual environment business Worlds.com is currently engaging in a legal action against MMOG developer/operator NCsoft for patent infringment, based on a patent that more or less covers almost every client-server based multiplayer game and virtual environment out there.

It doesn't end there, however. Worlds.com CEO Thom Kidrin has told Eric Krangel at Business Insider that if the suit against NCsoft succeeds, industry leaders World of Warcraft and Second Life are next. The company's legal representatives in this action, General Patent Corporation also yesterday announced that Worlds.com has been granted a third patent that extends the reach of their existing two.

The new patent (numbered 7,493,558) basically more specifically covers packet traffic - a server or servers communicating the positions of avatars (digital objects representing users) to the software that the user employs to view the environment. That's the client software loaded on your PC, or running under Flash embedded in a Web-browser, and such.

That seems to pretty much covers everything from the original Doom to Blue Mars, we think. Even some 3D Web-browser technology would seem to fall afoul of this.

"This Patent is a continuation of U.S. Patent No. 7,181,690 issued to Worlds.com in 2007 and bearing the same title," explained Paul Lerner, General Patent Corporation's Sr. Vice President and General Counsel. "This new patent significantly strengthens patent protection for the technology developed by Worlds.com."

Worlds.com has two more patents along these lines in the works.

Obviously, there's plenty of prior art involved, but prior art alone is generally not enough to overturn a patent claim. Coupled with the principle of laches (an active defense were the opposition must prove the patent-holder failed to exercise their rights until it became more profitable to do so), NCsoft may yet carry the day.

General Patent Corporation presently encourages opposition to the latest Congressional activities to reform patent law.

Dr. Alexander Poltorak, chairman and CEO of General Patent Corporation, says he "strongly believes that while some improvement is needed, the 2009 bill simply attempts to regurgitate the Patent Reform Act of 2007, and it will undermine the core of the U.S. patent system and weaken protection for small inventors, American entrepreneurs and university researchers. Pushed by the same corporate interests that lobbied for the 2007 legislation, the new bill appears to repeat the mistakes of the last two years, and− if passed − would legislate apportionment of damages and devalue existing patents en masse."

Tags: alexander-poltorak, breaking, eric-krangel, general-patent-corporation, infringement, law, lawsuit, ncsoft, patent, patent-troll, paul-lerner, suit, thom-kidrin, worlds.com, worlds.com-vs-ncsoft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Slacker said on 10:07AM 3-12-2009

And it is things like this that make me wonder if our current patent system can be saved or if we just need to throw the whole thing out and start over.

It has just become a way for legal firms to get paid for other peoples work.

arkanaloth said on 10:23AM 3-12-2009

pushing around NCSoft or SL isn't necessarily difficult, they go up against a bigger dog, like Blizz, SOE, etc... I suspect they'll bite off more than they can chew. They better have an ironclad case or this will be an entertainingly short issue.

Krystalle Voecks said on 10:29AM 3-12-2009

That's why they're suing NCsoft right now, we suspect. Harder to defend against it if they've got a successful court case ruling under their belt that their patents are legit.

arkanaloth said on 10:46AM 3-12-2009

makes sense.. try to setup legal precedent. But I still think they're in for a bigger mess than they suspect even if they win against NCSoft.

Bill said on 12:17PM 3-12-2009

If the people at Blizzard are smart, which they are, they will "help" NCSoft win. This reminds me of the case where some guy said he owned the moon.

Pavig Lok said on 10:24AM 3-12-2009

Well when you can claim to have invented the idea of a "marketing company" http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2007/11/ferguson-challe.html or even patent patent trolling http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/11/junk-patents.html there's something seriously wrong. Unfortunately these things don't get laughed out of court.

dandellion Kimban said on 10:58AM 3-12-2009

Patent laws like this actually justifies any kind of piracy one can think of. It's clear violence over any development with all the, pardon my openness, bastards wanting to grab a piece of cake of other people's success.

JP said on 10:26AM 3-12-2009

I hate NCSoft, but this is Bantha poo-doo. I hope all these companies counter sue for lost time, and legal fees, and worlds.com and all the lazy cunts they employ all end up in jail or dead.

JP said on 11:14AM 3-12-2009

HEY! I didn't confirm this one! Delete it! I thought better of this comment!

JP said on 10:38AM 3-12-2009

This represents everything that is wrong w/ our legal system, and our society as a whole. I'd wish death and injury against World.com's employees and families, but I don't want to get banned from commenting... so I won't :)

Dan said on 10:55AM 3-12-2009

Gotta love it when a company sucks so much and makes such terrible products that they have to resort to court cases to try and pick up the numbers...

Also gotta love it when they go for a smaller company first rather than taking on the big guys...

Sigh, what a pathetic attempt at "justice" from a pathetic company. One can only hope a decent judge is presiding...

AsFarAsLarry said on 11:23AM 3-12-2009

This is why we like Creative Commons. This sort of protection stifles creativity.

The other interesting about this, all legalize aside, is looking at this from a purely human point of view. Let's assume they win all of these things. Ultimately the cost of this would get passed along to us, either through increased product cost or loss of the product altogether. Now, I'm Chaz McWorld.com. If I knew I could make a 'lot' of money, but it would hurt a large number of people, would I do it?

I know my answer.

I unfortunately know the all-to-common answer that Chaz would pick. It's why my country is in the shape it's in now. It's also why it's a shame the asteroid missed last week, and maybe we ought to let the bees have a stab at it.

Tateru Nino said on 11:31AM 3-12-2009

Trivia note: Thomas Edison was sued for patent infringement over the lightbulb, but settled out-of-court.

lethality said on 11:46AM 3-12-2009

Yes, and who gets paid in the end? Lawyers, and companies who couldn't produce their own products well enough to be relevant.

Verde said on 11:42AM 3-12-2009

I love how patent trolls do nothing about this until they see very rich companies and then decide to go sue. I guarantee if WoW wasn't successful we probably wouldn't have seen this lawsuit.

I see these kinds of lawsuits as preventing innovation. As I am pretty ignorant regarding the patent/legal system I will not say much, but I do hope Worlds.com loses the fight miserably.

crowdBloke said on 11:54AM 3-12-2009

Boycott Worlds.com! Boo!

They should stop trying to steal other peoples hard earned and hard paid money!

Wjowski said on 9:16AM 3-13-2009

What exactly are they making that we should be boycotting?

Dude said on 6:29PM 3-15-2009

Worlds.com

Arath said on 8:35AM 6-26-2009

I'm not sure about how it works in America but there is a reasonable life span on patent protection (as such they have to be removed or renewed).

Especially in the technology field when something becomes so easy to do, so common and through a variety of different means that a patent no longer holds water. I was reading up on this and apparently the company has a lot of things on its side from attacking a foreign company to an expected sympathetic jury.

However if they attempt to take on Activision-Blizzard I expect they will be crushed and even NCsoft is not going to be a push over, regardless of their situation in the west.