{"id":3799,"date":"2014-03-20T20:47:56","date_gmt":"2014-03-20T20:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3799"},"modified":"2014-03-20T20:47:56","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T20:47:56","slug":"judge-rules-against-worlds-inc-in-virtual-world-patent-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3799","title":{"rendered":"Judge Rules Against Worlds Inc. In Virtual World Patent Claims"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cristiano Midnight over at SLUniverse has posted news of a court ruling in favour of Activision in a patent case brought by Worlds Inc<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Cristiano’s post links to a Gigaom article from last week :\u00a0World of Warcraft beats trolls in fight over 1996 \u201cvirtual worlds\u201d patent<\/a>\u00a0. One of Worlds Inc.’s patents is\u00a0US Patent 7,181,690<\/a> which makes a claim of :<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 :<\/p>\n

\u00a0U.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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> claims:<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

I can’t recall the Linden Lab case, but following the trail from the Massively article links to a Business Insider article : \u00a0Worlds.com CEO: We’re ‘Absolutely’ Going To Sue Second Life And World Of Warcraft<\/a>\u00a0in which Business Insider claim :<\/p>\n

Thom told us if he succeeds in his litigation, he “absolutely” intends to pursue follow-up suits against industry leaders Second Life and WoW.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That article itself actually gets a quote from\u00a0Ben Duranske, whom older Second Life users may recall as he used to have a blog called Virtually Blind<\/a>, which covered legal issues in virtual worlds and in many cases that meant Second Life.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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