the Seikens Board

online interactions!!

The long name of the patent is: "System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space"
and you can find the patent here http://www.google.com/patents?id=wv5-AA ... =7,181,690

Worlds.com patented this **** patent and is trying to sue NCSoft who is an MMORPG distributor of several big online games such as Guild Wars, Lineage series, City of Heroes and Villains and the upcoming Aion.

If NCSoft loses this in the court we might not see any MMORPGs anymore. Because all MMORPG uses this system: online interactions.

World of Warcraft has over 11 million subscribers.

Guess which company is going to be the most hated company year 2009, or ever.

Hooray super broad patents. /sarcasm

Well, it's not that broad now that I read the abstract. I suppose it is going to depend on just how in-depth the patent needs to be to be able to claim that MMORPGs are indeed breaching said patent.

I suspect that this will fail.

Or are these people going to sue... I dunno... nature?

And just to add an interesting comment from this blog:

In this line of work I have become used to ludicrous patents, but this one should be awarded a price. Given that the filing date is August 2000, I am sure that any examiner should have come up with examples of graphical avatar interaction in a 3D environment. Meridian 59 and Te Realm Online were released in 1996, Ultima Online in 1997, Lineage in 1998, and Everquest in 1999. All of them embody exactly the patent claim, so how could it have been awarded with such extensive prior art?

See also this
Filing date: Aug 3, 2000
Issue date: Feb 20, 2007

The filed the patent year 2000, but was issued seven years later. So I wonder how this war is going to end, will worlds.com win or lose?

I don't think it will win.

Reminds me of another stupid sue, where a company patent the ability to put an image on a folder in the OS.
This was in 2006. Which image in folders already existed long long ago (a.k.a prior art).

Anyway, after passing the patent 2006, they sued apple and microsoft for putting images on the folders.
But they can't win because it can be proven that both apple and microsoft used this idea before they patent it.