Once more, another challenger has arisen to joust the law in a U.S. court room. It’s over the technology behind the Massively Multiplayer Online game, and how it uses data.
Paltalk are issuing the suit against Turbine. To make matters worse, in 2006 they sued Microsoft over it’s Halo multiplayer mechanics, with the giant settling the claim - ‘validating’ them.
In actual fact Paltalk aren’t the original owners of the two patents, they bought them from a company called HearMe in 2002.
”Apart from Turbine, the lawsuit targets Japan’s Sony Corp., maker of the online game Everquest; Activision Blizzard Inc., whose World of Warcraft is the world’s most popular subscription-based online game; NCSoft Corp. of South Korea, maker of the game Guild Wars; and the British firm Jagex Ltd., which produces the free online game Runescape,” reports the Boston Globe.
It’s all to do with online environments where connected users experience the same events simultaneously, like the slaying of a level 2 boar or some building blowing up. Turbine of course is the developer of The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online.
It’s unclear if the companies will follow in Microsoft’s footsteps and simply cough up to shoo this litigation away, or if they’ll fight it and try to have the courts dismiss the issue.
It really can pay to patent, or to take up a legal career in the United States.
Simultaneous (lag notwithstanding) carnage online in Turbine’s LOTROSource: VE3D
