Cristiano Midnight over at SLUniverse has posted news of a court ruling in favour of Activision in a patent case brought by Worlds Inc. This is an important case because Worlds Inc. have been challenging a lot of MMO’s and Virtual Worlds over alleged use of their patents.
Cristiano’s post links to a Gigaom article from last week : World of Warcraft beats trolls in fight over 1996 “virtual worlds” patent . One of Worlds Inc.’s patents is US Patent 7,181,690 which makes a claim of :
A method for enabling a first user to interact with other users in a virtual space, wherein the first user and the other users each have an avatar and a client process associated therewith, and wherein each client process is in communication with a server process.
There’s more in the link, but that would cover a lot of MMO’s and virtual worlds were Worlds Inc. to win a case. However in the Activision case Gigaom are quoted as saying :
U.S. District Judge Denise Casper wrote that patents belonging to Worlds Inc. appear invalid because the inventions they describe already appeared in public before the patents were filed.
Worlds Inc. have in the past said that they may also look to see if Second Life is violating their patents, although a Massively article on the same issue claims:
This isn’t Worlds’ first attempt to sue an MMO studio over these allegations, as it went after (and lost to) NCsoft and Linden Lab several years ago.
I can’t recall the Linden Lab case, but following the trail from the Massively article links to a Business Insider article : Worlds.com CEO: We’re ‘Absolutely’ Going To Sue Second Life And World Of Warcraft in which Business Insider claim :
Thom told us if he succeeds in his litigation, he “absolutely” intends to pursue follow-up suits against industry leaders Second Life and WoW.
That article itself actually gets a quote from Ben Duranske, whom older Second Life users may recall as he used to have a blog called Virtually Blind, which covered legal issues in virtual worlds and in many cases that meant Second Life.
Worlds Inc. haven’t given up on their patent claims, so there’s more to come, but the tide does appear to be turning very much against them, which will be a relief to many a MMO and virtual world.