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Microsoft Wins Xbox Patent Battle
by Kris Graft [PC, Console/PC]
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August 3, 2010
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Microsoft last week won a court case originating in 2004 that had inventors suing the Xbox maker for allegedly infringing on online multiplayer gaming-related patents, according to court documents obtained by Gamasutra.
In 2004, Peter A. Hochstein, Jeffrey Tenenbaum and patent rights holder Harold Milton Jr. filed suit against Microsoft and Sony, accusing the companies of infringing on the 1994 patent, "Apparatus and method for electrically connecting remotely located video games," which covers devices that facilitate remote multiplayer gaming.
The plaintiffs said Microsoft and Sony infringed on the patent with Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network, and were seeking royalties and an injunction against the continued use of the technology described in the patent.
U.S. District Court Judge Paul D. Borman ruled that the Michigan plaintiffs in the case would recover nothing, that the action be dismissed and that Microsoft collect legal fees from the plaintiffs.
The judge took issue with the patent's use of the term "electrical connection" -- Xbox Live does not use such a connection for communicating over the service, the court decided.
The patent in question refers to an invention that allows "for two or more players playing the same video game to compete with each other without using the same physical video game which alleviates the necessity of proximity of the players."
Sony settled with the plaintiffs out of court in April 2009, but Microsoft continued on with the case.
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Good, I'm glad Microsoft gets to collect legal fees from the plaintiffs. Maybe more victories like this will stop all of this stupid patent litigation. Ugh. Let's just make friggin' great products.
The purpose of patents is to spur innovation by rewarding it, but software patents only stifle innovation. Copyrights and trademark law should be enough to protect the intellectual property rights of software developers. We should all compete on the quality of our implementations, not on who rushed an obvious idea or slight iteration on prior art to the patent office first.
On the other hand, by rolling over and paying hush money, Sony kind of screwed the rest of us.
Not that I totally blame Sony. Fighting lawsuits suck time and money. And, even if you know you're 100% right, there is still a chance you can lose.
Software isn't toasters. Software changes too fast to be appropriately subject to the same time frame of protections as other inventions. Furthermore, the "no prior art" and "non-obvious" requirements aren't enforced nearly to the degree they should be for software. There's no way an idea like the "backing store" should ever have been approved for a patent, and I'd bet that the vast majority of software patents are equally obvious.
When I lived near DC, a friend who worked at the USPTO told me that they deliberately didn't hire people with subject matter knowledge. Virtually no one with computer science knowledge reviewed software patent applications... by design. I've heard that matters have improved since then, but a lot of the damage is already done. Unproductive patent trolls -- the GoDaddy squatters of the patent world -- are sitting on obvious and broad concepts, extracting license fees or settlement payouts while adding zero utility.
Meh. Probably preaching to the choir here, but it's worth a brief mention to support the comment that a win for Microsoft on this one is a win for gamers and game developers.