Worlds.com lawsuit settled
By
AmazingMOO,
Posted on: 2010-04-27 09:39 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
worlds.com got busted baaaaaaaad 
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Whoa, Worlds only has one full-time employee? O.o
And he wanted to take on one of the largest (the largest? not sure) game publishing companies in Korea?
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
I think they should keep trying. What's the worse that could happen? Worlds.com goes bankrupt?
Huh. Company needs money. Lawsuit ends in settlement. Coincidence? You decide...
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Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:
Heh...what a fool. He be givin' us smack talk, what else he expectin'?
I Pity The Fool!
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
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Well, he goes after NcSoft, when in fact he should probably have gone after every gaming company. I can actually envision him.
Blizzard for World of Warcraft... Heck NO, they got too much money.
...
goes down the list.
Ncsoft. Hmm yea.. I'll sue this company! They are not as big as Blizzard.
...
The picture posted says it all. I hope that company did not get a dime/cent (insert other currency here) and lost its money.
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This is one of the reasons why IP law is generally BAD. It allows patent-trolls like this creep to cause damage to the world around them.
This ended up for the better because NCSoft was large enough that they could afford to squash this guy like the gnat he is, but it doesn't always work that way.
A lot of the time in IP law, it's the other way 'round-- an 800 lb gorilla in the plaintiff's seat and Joe Gnat in the defendant's seat trying to figure out whether or not he has a chance to protect himself legally without blowing his life's savings on legal fees. The record industry's drive-by lawsuits are a VERY good example of how that works. 'Pay us money or get obliterated.' If that message is delivered via an attorney it's a 'legal dispute'. However, it's only extortion when it comes from two large men with bad suits and brass knuckles?
Un-uh. Nope. Extortion and blackmail are extortion and blackmail no matter how you dress 'em up.
NCSoft appears to be a fairly honorable company with honorable people in the drivers' seats. How many companies can you really say that for?
I'm actually not sure how I feel about this news. I'm happy that it's no longer an issue, but frankly, by settling, hasn't NC tacitly said that this guy's suit has merit then? why did they not just go ahead and make this guy present his case in court, and then turn around and sue him for legal expenses? I realize that sometimes it's nice to make annoying little gnats go away, and in this case they might have done that. I just am slightly worried about NC giving ANYTHING to this turdburglar that might in any way legitimize his position.
Arc #1267 The Key of Brass and Flame
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No, they've just said that it's cheaper and easier to give him a little bit of undisclosed money than to pay legal expenses and go to court (twice, if they then sue him for legal expenses).
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Originally Posted by TerraFan
by settling, hasn't NC tacitly said that this guy's suit has merit then?
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http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
Worlds.com:WE ARE INVENTORS OF MMO NCSOFT ONLY ONES USE MMO
Ncsoft: Wanna get through this without humiliation?
Geez. Blizzard might as well sue Valve for stealing "their idea" (FPS)
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Sure, he may try to extort money from someone else, but he would have to at least go through the same legal process again, which is price, and unlikely given the company's currently shaky financial position (he may need the settlement just to stay afloat). Besides that, Blizzard and Sony aren't exactly easy targets, and other MMO developers could be too small to get any useful settlement from.|
Originally Posted by TerraFan
I'm actually not sure how I feel about this news. I'm happy that it's no longer an issue, but frankly, by settling, hasn't NC tacitly said that this guy's suit has merit then? why did they not just go ahead and make this guy present his case in court, and then turn around and sue him for legal expenses? I realize that sometimes it's nice to make annoying little gnats go away, and in this case they might have done that. I just am slightly worried about NC giving ANYTHING to this turdburglar that might in any way legitimize his position.
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Actually, it's better to settle with him for a marginal amount, than to take him to court and possibly loose, which creates a really bad legal precedent.
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Which is the lesser of the 2 evils. Had it gone to court and this [censored]-monkey won. It probably given him the edge to go after the big names like Sony, Activision, EA and make even more money for being a no-talent [censored] hat.
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Originally Posted by Obsidius
Actually, it's better to settle with him for a marginal amount, than to take him to court and possibly loose, which creates a really bad legal precedent. |
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Originally Posted by Jbot
Worlds.com:WE ARE INVENTORS OF MMO NCSOFT ONLY ONES USE MMO
Ncsoft: Wanna get through this without humiliation? Geez. Blizzard might as well sue Valve for stealing "their idea" (FPS) |
the difference is that bizzard didn't patent that idea.
Worlds.com patented the concept of managing map data on a 3d grid and handling latency.
And... two ways to look at it: either the other MMO giants use a way to manage mapping thats so different from Worlds that it couldn't be considered to be related to the patent... or worlds was hoping for enough settlement $$ from this case to fund suits against the others.
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Actually, I bet HE gave NCSoft a bit of money. Anything to prevent NCSoft from squishing him like a bug, and they probably settled on an amount far cheaper than court expenses.
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Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
No, they've just said that it's cheaper and easier to give him a little bit of undisclosed money than to pay legal expenses and go to court (twice, if they then sue him for legal expenses).
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3 words
Laugh out Loud
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It's the same amount of silliness |
Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
the difference is that bizzard didn't patent that idea.
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Well of course not.|
Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
the difference is that bizzard didn't patent that idea.
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The Simpsons did.
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Originally Posted by LiquidX
Well of course not.
The Simpsons did. |
Was at a game developer convention a few years ago. There was a legal study on the progression of game patents. For years, it had been common practice to "build off" your competition's mechanics: There were numerous maze-and-chase games that took slightly different spins off pac man, plenty of different fighting games since double dragon and yie ar kung fu (and they weren't the first in their genre either) and plenty of side-scrolling shooters like Defender. There wasn't much thought of patenting a game mechanic. Hardware got patented, game mechanics... notsomuch.
That's changed.
Back then, it was noted that Nintendo patented a "fear meter". There were dozens of examples-- many of them barely a modification off the public-domain mechanic they built on top of (or other identical prior art). The patent office, though, wasn't exactly very discriminatory to that little detail & awarded the patents rather quickly
In conversation with the presenter, a CoH dev that was there noted that if he'd thought to patent sidekicking-- which was widely copied in other MMO's in one form or another, Cryptic/NCSoft probably could have been making as much from the licensing of the patent than they made off CoH sales.
Would you guys have thought it was fair for Cryptic/NCSoft to sue WoW and EQ2 and AoC and everyone else that put a mentoring system out after them... had they applied and received a patent?
Some people try to claim the idea as theirs. Some believe that things are better served by letting the idea remain open to the public. Some ideas are just so common-sense they shouldn't be patentable. To me, the problem here was less about worlds.com, but the fact that the patent office is so generous at awarding those patents out.
Worlds DID think up some ideas for breaking some pretty challenging (for the time) hurdles. They developed, demonstrated, and patented the tech. They just failed to monetize off of it in their own projects. Whether that patent should have been granted or not, it was.... so worlds.com essentially has a note from the US Government saying that they owned that idea.
When you see people profiting off something the government says you own, is it really THAT unreasonable to seek compensation?
((NOTE: all that is devils' advocacy. Personally, I'm much more a fan of keeping ideas open and free for everyone. I'd also go bankrupt running my own business by giving away everything, though...))
Isn't talking about legal matters and lawsuits against the rules here?
Or does that only count for OPEN lawsuits and legal matter, and once something is "settled" or closed, it's allowed to be talked about?
Ref, can we get a decision here?
Honestly, I'd take the Worlds patent only slightly more seriously than the guy in Australia who managed to get a patent for a 'circular motion assistance device' -- the wheel. (And the onyl reason I'd take Worlds more seriously is because the Australian guy was doing it to make fun of the patent office)
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
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Curious as to why. Seriously... not being a jerk here, but once you get off the fansites full of misinformation, the patent didn't seem nearly as abusive. I'm not a fan of patent zealots, but there seemed to be considerably worse abuses out there, but this particular one gets a lot of ire.|
Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
Honestly, I'd take the Worlds patent only slightly more seriously than the guy in Australia who managed to get a patent for a 'circular motion assistance device' -- the wheel. (And the onyl reason I'd take Worlds more seriously is because the Australian guy was doing it to make fun of the patent office)
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From what I've read:
- many people cite the filing date (2000) as post EQ, but the original filing was 1996, not 2000, and it was based on tech they first demonstrated even before that.
- It didn't cover what was available at that time in MUDS, moos, or the earliest multiplayer graphical games, but covered a general architecture that could handle some of the barricades that they saw from moving away from general MUDS to larger (geographically and population-wise) 3d games.
- While the patent was (originally) filed in '96, it was only awarded in 2007. By that time, a whole industry had developed, many using techniques that they felt that they researched and developed... and that the USPTO had just told them that they had ownership right to. That's not the typical 'submarine patent' behavior where they file broad generic patents, wait for the industry to grow dependent on tech that would theoretically infringe, then sue.
I'm not sure where the "prior art" was at that time- God knows, I was still on text-based MUDS back then. Compared to what I was playing with, and put in that context, a 1996 patent covering this stuff (and showing a demonstrable model) seemed pretty advanced... but I wasn't actively looking.
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Blizzard isn't the first company to come up with an idea to make an mmofps. See my homepage. SOE owns that ballpark.
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Originally Posted by Jbot
Worlds.com:WE ARE INVENTORS OF MMO NCSOFT ONLY ONES USE MMO
Ncsoft: Wanna get through this without humiliation? Geez. Blizzard might as well sue Valve for stealing "their idea" (FPS) |
Friends don't let friends buy an ncsoft controlled project.
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This thread really should be in the culture forum rather then the CoH General...*shrug*
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Originally Posted by Westley
Isn't talking about legal matters and lawsuits against the rules here?
Or does that only count for OPEN lawsuits and legal matter, and once something is "settled" or closed, it's allowed to be talked about? Ref, can we get a decision here? |
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Air Warrior was prior art. Club Caribe was prior art. Scuttlebutt from my industry friends is Lucasarts took notice of worlds.com's attempt to patent something they had ALREADY patented in 1986 and then released into the public domain around 1991.|
Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
I'm not sure where the "prior art" was at that time- God knows, I was still on text-based MUDS back then. Compared to what I was playing with, and put in that context, a 1996 patent covering this stuff (and showing a demonstrable model) seemed pretty advanced... but I wasn't actively looking.
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Here is what Worlds.com "patented":
http://www.google.com/patents?id=wv5...page&q&f=false
Do you see that? they basically tried to patent, not just a specific technology or technique, but a generic concept. Read it very closely, this also claims patent over FPS games. This is exactly like the man in australia patenting the wheel.
Furthermore, worlds.com did NOT DEVELOP ANY PROOF OF CONCEPT until late 2005 which is why the patent took that long to be granted. I want to stress that and make it clear to you. Your prior post talks about all of these things they supposedly did but it's factually not true.
And I reiterate Lucasfilm had already patented this for Habitat/Club Caribe and released it into the public domain likely before this patent troll company president was old enough to be out of diapers. The patent office is incredibly lax and does not understand, and there are plenty of cases, like this one, of the patent office reissuing something they already issued a patent on.
Seems as if the lawsuit against ncsoft has been settled
http://www.massively.com/2010/04/27/...wsuit-settled/
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