Worlds.com patent suit hits NCSoft
A while back I mentioned that Worlds.com had made known the intention to sue over their virtual world patents.
Now the other shoe has dropped, as Virtual Worlds News reports that they filed suit against NCSoft on Christmas Eve.
The patents in question deal with the notion of network culling on the server in 3d worlds, trimming down the set of things sent to the client based on server-side visibility algorithms.
Worlds.com really is a pioneer in the space — WorldsAway Worlds Chat being one of the early VW systems in the first half of the 90s. The earliest forms of the patents were filed in 1996, so pretty much all of the big 3d MMOs are later.
That said, there’s still plenty of earlier work done on network culling and yes, even 3d, and of course there’s a lot of money at stake, so expect a fight.
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This is bad.
It’s not as if server-side culling in modern MMOs would be done any differently had Worlds.com never existed. Necessity would undoubtedly have led to the “invention” of server-side visibility culling, just as surely as it led to its independent “invention” by parties not in any way affiliated with Worlds.com. Quite simply, the Worlds.com patent fails to serve its primary purpose: “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.
Software patents need to go away. The sooner the better.
Going by what’s found on Cornell (http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex/Patent) I can see Worlds.com potentially falling afoul of both the “nonobvious” requirement and the “novelty” requirement (since as Raph mentioned, plenty of network culling work had already been done prior to their patent). The patents were already awarded, of course; the award of the patent will likely influence the court’s view of the case but likely not pre-determine it.
Also, as a general legal principle there is a timeliness concern. If the patents have been around for this long, why wait until now? The delay could be taken as an implied waiver by the courts.
If the Grinch had been a lawyer, Whoville would have been toast.
The Worlds.com tactics are so tranparently sleezy, even if they had a legitimate patent (doubtful) one would be hard pressed to see this as anything other than naked opportunism. This is the stupidest thing I’ve seen in game law since Wizards of the Coast patented turning a card sideways and decimated the fledgling trading card game industry. I sincerely hope the outcome is different this time around.
Raph, isn’t Worlds Away the Fujitsu Habitat-based 2d sideview VW?
IIRC Worlds.com first showed up with ‘Worlds Chat’ which was a 2.5D Wolfenstein-type engine (might have been Doom) chat service with a windows client. This was ~95… I think… Here (no date);
http://www.digitalspace.com/avatars/book/fullbook/chwc/chwc1.htm
Randy Farmer just wrote a great piece about this this morning;
http://thefarmers.org/Habitat/2008/12/the_demise_of_the_word_balloon_1.html
Argh, yes. 😛 All those ones with “worlds” in their name, I always mix them up. 😛 WorldsAway was indeed the evolved Habitat. I’ll correct the post.
Wow, what a flashback. I remember my attempt at a parting gift to Philips Media when I left the company in 1995. I demo’ed Worlds’ app to one of an exec and tried to get him to pick up on the significance of it. Apparently didn’t take.
On a related note, I remember a year or two before this happened, everyone was all aflutter because Compton’s (the encyclopedia people) filed and obtained a patent for… database technology.
/shrug
-D-
How is this likely to affect US-based customers of non-US based MMO providers? For the most part US Patents do not apply to non-US operating companies directly, especially in Europe where software is not patentable in the vast (vast) majority of cases.
Let’s imagine for a moment that Worlds.com wins a precendent decision (Heaven forbid) in their case against NCSoft. I believe from a US market perspective that MMO’s would be able to continue on a global scale with US-based players connecting to non-US based providers.
The non-US market will continue unaffected regardless of any decisions in this case.
Just a page about the History of Worlds.com and its “new emergence” patent goes back to 1995
Ever watch the Tv Show dragons den?
how many times have they said make sure your idea is patented?
This is because no matter who’s idea or thought or even product came first, its who patented it and owns the patent that is important.
As for timing of the winning of the patent itself, we all know how slow legal process take, the patent was put forward many many years before it was granted Im sure.
Ive had a quick google and found this url
http://www.acpirateradio.co.uk/khz2008/
It says the “team” came together in 1994 but wasn’t awarded the patent till 2001, I’m guessing that anyone after 2001 not asking for licence could be on shaky ground, or at least on the phone to there legal teams.
Maybe Worlds.com will just do some deals, who knows, i think i will be watching this space for a few more years to come lol
That ignores the principal of prior art. The patent is not valid if the concept it embodies was public knowledge prior to the granting of the patent. The case against this patent is so self-evident that even filing an 11th-hour suit over the holidays against a troubled defendant from a foreign country in a hostile jurisdiction is a long shot.
My hope is that there is sufficient basis for a countersuit of sufficient magnitude to discourage other bottom-feeders. My fear is that NCSoft will settle for a small token amount, establishing a precedent when Worlds starts gunning for the bigger players.
“My fear is that NCSoft will settle for a small token amount, establishing a precedent when Worlds starts gunning for the bigger players.”
The North American operation is about 1/3 the size of NCSoft’s Korean operation. Even with the failure of Tabula Rasa, you’d think after years of Lineage earnings they’d have a bit of a war chest. They’re certainly not a small player.
So many of the recent cases, from EULA enforcement to patent infringement seem to be in the collective interest of all the big players. A little collaboration between the legal departments of Sony, EA, Blizzard and NCSoft might be good about now. Is there precedent for that? (Do they read Raph’s blog?)
So everything is peachy as long as everyone who wants to build virtual worlds without going overseas is screwed? How optimistic.
When Fender unveiled the Broadcaster many decades ago, Gretsch said, “Hey, Fender, we were selling Broadkasters first.” Fender replied, “Okay, we’ll call our guitar the Telecaster.” Who’s ever heard of a Gretsch Broadkaster? Fender Telecaster?
When IP rights come up, a good number of people are always preaching doom and gloom. “If this case goes this way or that, all manufacturing will be done overseas!”
But what really happens is one of three things: a) manufacturers say “okay, let’s do this our way” and come up with something better, b) manufacturers say “fine, let’s license the IP and get outside support while we’re at it,” or c) manufacturers really do say “well, shucks, I guess we’ll have to go overseas because it’s cheaper.”
I emphasized the last bit because all this talk about innovation and prior art loses touch with what “IP hate” is all about: money. Yes, that’s right. There isn’t just one way to do something. There are many ways to do something. It’s just cheaper to do something that has already been done. (In the long run, it’s actually more risky and can be more expensive, but that’s a different topic.)
In the end, an underfunded and backed-up patent office encourages innovation. Sure, some businesses pack their bags and move elsewhere, but that can only be a good thing for those businesses that stayed and toughed it out. Who knows? Maybe those businesses will make Telecasters, too.
worlds.com had to file against some company or risk the enforceability of the patent vis-a-vis a laches affirmative defense because more than six years has passed since issuance.
Morgan: the Broadkaster/Telecaster dispute was in trademark, not patent; and, the Gretsch Broadkaster at issue at the time was a drum set, not a guitar.
I think Jeff Cole has the main point here: no matter what the validity of the claim, in these tough times the Board is going to insist you ‘use it or lose it’ for patents. A US lawyer once advised me that it costs upwards of $300k to defend a patent claim like this, and (while I have no idea whether those costs are reasonable), many companies would simply say “alright already, we’ll take a license and be done with it”.
The other issues are well rehearsed above: international enforcement (probably impossible), prior art (I’d guess everyone who knows the tech team at NC Soft has sent them tons of papers showing prior art already), alternative methods (probably several), independent prior discovery, non-obvious application of existing technology, etc etc.
Can anyone see SONY paying out on this? (Large companies usually do a ‘patent swap’ anyway – basically SONY has a bank of x-million patents and the plaintiff will have breached one of them, so SONY says “we’ll let you off your breach if you let us off ours”). I suspect (and have reason to believe) that every single game produced since 1995 infringes on a patent held by one of the big 4 patent holders (EA, SONY, MS, Philips). That is one of the main reasons large companies file heaps and heaps of totally nonsensical patent: they use them as ‘game chips’ in the great software patent war that does nothing but make US lawyers filthy and rich.
So, as someone says above: the sooner the US drops patents on software and business processes and comes into line with the enlightened world the better.
Jeff Cole:
IP is IP. The distinction between trademarks and patents is irrelevant to the point I made, which was that when law forces the issue of change, that’s usually a good thing. From a system-level point of view anyway. Not so much of a good thing for the firms that were weeded out.
And, yes, Broadkaster was the name of a line of Gretsch drum products. Now it’s the name of a line of Gretsch bass guitars. Never said otherwise. (I have a 1958 Gretsch New Yorker acoustic guitar! Looks like this.)
David Bailey:
People like to say this, too. Everyone likes magic-pill solutions. The truth is that software patents are good patents. The problems are the USPTO is underfunded, overworked, and has a huge evergrowing backlog of patent filings. (When someone says they have a patent, they usually don’t. They have a patent pending. Takes a long, long time to actually get a patent claim through the pipeline to the end.)
Because of this, they sacrifice effectiveness in favor of efficiency, which means accepting lots of frivolous patent claims. But, hey, who cares about the real problems, right? Let’s just do away with property altogether. Many American tribes did just fine, at least until the Europeans arrived and staked out their claims.
You’re taking one line out of it’s context and then further twisting the commentary. Please don’t.
My original question remains: What effect is this situation likely to have on US-based customers of non-US based MMO providers?
I also have another question for those here who are knowledgeable about US Patent law: How far is the reported pressure for a reform of the US Patent system likely to go? Do you expect a complete reform, significant changes to the system such as preventing software patenting as per the European model, or do you not expect the current pressure to have much of an effect on the system?
The patent is all but invalidated. The story hit Slashdot. A commenter on Slashdot, Michael Snoswell, said that he has prior arc which covered all claims of the patent. He says that publicly lectured about his project in the 90s. After a bit of Google search I found a paper that he wrote about his project called Cyberterm. It’s a 3-D Chat system framework which indeed encompass every claim on that patent from multiple clients communicating with a central server, object store in a data, avatar movement and facing tracking and object pruning based on the nearness of objects to a client’s Point of View. The work that Michael Snoswell did was in 1991-92. Far before the date of Worlds.com initial patent application.
@Jeff Cole
Thank you for posting this. I meant “laches” when I said “implied waiver”. I always forget the term laches, but that’s exactly it.
(For the curious, a wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity) )
Morgan Ramsay: The truth is that software patents are good patents. The problems are the USPTO is underfunded, overworked, and has a huge evergrowing backlog of patent filings.
And you do of course know a lot about computer-programming and patent law…
USPTO was against sofware patents, but the courts were of course more compentent and had to have the final word on the issue. Anyone who knows anything about computer science and maths have to know that software patents are, and will always be, a mess.
Ola Fosheim Grøstad:
War is messy, too. Doesn’t mean war is never necessary.
Heh, my dad pioneered the computer age at Control Data (y’know, Seymour Cray’s company) back in the day, designing hardware that was way ahead of the times. I don’t have to be intimately familiar with these subjects to understand the issues.
If the patents bother you, join a consortium with membership agreements over the IP of the members.
Otherwise, spend lots and lots of money on lawyers.
The choices here aren’t that many.
It will be interesting to see if this law suit was the result of Worlds.com simply being worried about the patent expiring, or if they plan to go the “business model by litigation route.” We won’t know for sure unless they file against another MMO company or two.
-Michael
Muckbeast – Game Design and Virtual Worlds
http://www.muckbeast.com
Morgan Ramsay:
You say it’s about money, I say it’s about freedom.
The problem is that often the most natural way to do something is precisely what is being patented. When you say it’s “cheaper to do something that has already been done”, you’re assuming patent infringers are copying those whose IP is being infringed. In fact, it’s often the case that patents are infringed by those who have independently come up with the same solution as the one that’s been patented.
I seriously doubt NCSoft ever had access to Worlds.com’s culling algorithms, which would mean there was no copying involved. It is far more likely that NCSoft and Worlds.com arrived at the same solution independently of each other. NCSoft shouldn’t be punished for that.
Adrian Lopez:
That evil patent office! Those oppressors! Oh, the humanity! ::|
Civil litigation is about money, not crime and punishment.
It’s so much easier to argue against yourself than to argue against what your opponents are actually saying.
Never heard of punitive damages, have ya’ Morgan?
If the word “punished” bothers you so much, I can easily amend my statement to read “NCSoft shouldn’t be sued for that”.
Adrian Lopez:
What is punitive damages? Oh, yes… money.
Yes, it’s money. Guess what else it is:
pu·ni·tive (pyōō’nĭ-tĭv) adj. Inflicting or aiming to inflict punishment; punishing.
I’m sure you’d love to leave out those definitions that clearly demonstrate the pettiness of your remarks, but you don’t get to do that.
Adrian Lopez:
That’s nice, but the law doesn’t care what Webster says. No, sir, these words in law have unmodern origins and now they are only labels. Sometimes they’re from vastly different cultures and other times they’re just plain Gre— Latin.
Punitive damages is awarded as a deterrent. Nuclear weapons also serve as a deterrent, but we don’t call their keeping “punishment.” Punitive damages is specific to the awarding jurisdiction because, as such damages is often reduced or eliminated entirely by the appellate court, punitive damages is meant as an outlet for the people of a jurisdiction to voice outrage with regard to specific conduct.
In civil cases, outrage is expressed with what amounts to huge fines. In criminal cases, outrage is expressed with severe suspensions or eradication of civil liberties. Civil litigation is all about money. Any lawyer will tell you the same.
But this is tangential to the original point, that “IP hate” is all about money. You think that “IP hate” is about freedom because you believe that “first to invent” is meaningful. The truth is that “first to claim invention” is more often superior. Thomas Edison proved that.
That definition was meant to address your specific objection that civil litigation is not about punishment, so your quip that “the law doesn’t care what Webster says” is quite irrelevant. Nitpicking is unbecoming.
If you wish to discuss those issues that are actually relevant to this discussion — such as the fact that NCSoft is being sued for something they most likely came up with independently of Worlds.com — I’m willing to talk. If, on the other hand, you’d rather focus on irrelevancies and pretend that you’ve raised legitimate objections to what I said, you can simply bugger off.
Morgan, the problem with Software patents is that there is a very finite set of solutions to particular algorithmic problems, and the rate at which we advance past them is considerably faster than the 20 years that patents get.
This is a case in which having IP rights over algorithims results in the stifling of, rather than the encouragement of, innovation. This flies in the face of what patents were created to do. Patents existed to encourage new developments in technologies by making sure that inventors had a way to profit from their hard work; they were not created to allow patent trolls to patent relatively obvious things so that they can make money when someone ends up needing to use a similar solution as part of an actual product.
But even if you removed the patent trolls, this would still become a problem; software development is too iterative, and too rapid, so allowing patents of algorithms effectively hamstrings development rather than inspiring it. Carmack’s rightfully pointed out that if you were to look at all of the current software patents and enforce all of them, not a single piece of software that reached any level of complexity would be clear of infringement. There’s too much similarity across too many different types of application, and there are only so many ways to solve problems that crop up all over the place.
But the Patent system was also intended to be a repository of knowledge, where people could look back at previous inventions and see how they worked, and once the patent expired could make use of those advancements. This falls apart in software too, because if you actually go looking at the patents that’ve been filed, you’re almost certain to come into somthing that violates some part of your program because of the above. So you can’t even use it as a resource without increasing your liability. Being aware of the fact that there’s a patent you’re violating carries a higher penalty than not. So applied to software, the system no longer functions as intended. As such, it either needs to be reformed or abolished; that’s what you do with a broken system. Fix it or replace it.
And note: removing software patents does not hamper the ability for software creators to profit either; source code is protected by copyright, so any individual program is still protected, just not the concepts behind them. Which is pretty much how it should be; ideas without implementation are pretty much useless. Protecting the implementation and not the idea is more beneficial to a system of innovation.
Oh, and Morgan:
This is completely irrelevant. The question ultimately becomes does the system encourage innovation, or discourage it? Because that’s what it’s supposed to be doing, that was the goal in it’s creation; what’s meaningful in terms of the impact on the inventor is irrelevant until that question is answered.
If it’s discouraging innovation, the system is broken. If the system is broken, it needs to be fixed. Period. End of discussion.
I’ve already said what I wanted to say and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
But decompilation of compiled code has been successfully defended in court under the fair use doctrine of US copyright law (though I’m sure that’s still a contentious issue).
I wonder… I know with music copyrights, you can record and sell a cover of a song without the consent of the writer by payment of “mechanical rights” — basically, a default royalty. Usually you can get a better rate by negotiating with the rights holder, but the default rate acts as a de-facto cap while still insuring access to the work.
Perhaps something similar would be useful for software patents. It might address some of the problems, without tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
Not specifically @Eolirin, but quoting:
I really don’t think the situation is binary in that way. I also don’t think there is a “perfect” system that wouldn’t be broken in some way, discouraging invention in some subset of circumstances.
But, the debate’s gotten pretty sour, so I’d be surprised if it continued.
There’s A 50k reward for proof of Prior Art.
“If an advisor’s research leads Article One to conclude the patents are invalid, he or she will receive up to $50,000. Active advisors can also receive 5% of Article One’s net annual profit.”
sorry double posted, but i don’t know how to edit the previous comments.
what do you think of this as prior art? the voice in the video says 1993.