Three More MMO Developers Receive Letters from Treehouse Attorneys

http://gamepolitics.com/2013/07/10/three-more-mmo-developers-receive-letters-treehouse-attorneys

by bigstartups • 13 years ago

79 35 13 years ago

I've been contact by about a half dozen small game developers in addition to myself. I can only assume the true number is many times that possibly in the hundreds.

These scum have moved on from litigating agains the big players in the industry to trying to extort the smallest and most vulnerable developers.

It's truly sickening...

tankbot• 13 years ago

Disgusting, but it's only natural. The little guys don't have the resources to fight it out in court and keep their heads above water, so trolls can extort a small settlement or licensing fee from them. Ironically analogous to trolls in fairy tales that would extort characters under dubious pretense.

Trolls are weak against fire and acid. Just sayin'.

momerath• 13 years ago

Indeed, hypothetically, if a tiny game developer had gotten such a letter, they would probably be asking their friendly lawyer to find a moment to advise them, rather than saying anything publicly. I suspect a great many such extortion letters have been sent; let's hope they sent so many that the combined defense will be enough.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

Treehouse? These guys or someone different?

http://teamtreehouse.com/

GuiA• 13 years ago

First paragraph:

"GamePolitics has learned that at least three more independent development studios received letters from the law firm representing Treehouse Avatar Technologies"

Treehouse Avatar Technologies != Team Treehouse

ddeck2• 13 years ago

No, these guys:

https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/scr/cc/CorporationsCanada/fdrlCrpDt...

jcromartie• 13 years ago

I also thought of this indie board game: http://store.looneylabs.com/Treehouse

ddeck2• 13 years ago

The patent referred to:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...

Steko• 13 years ago

Filing date: November 30, 2010

A character having a plurality of attributes is created by a network user while within a character-enabled network site.

Each attribute is defined by at least one of either audio data and/or visual image data and is selected by the user from a plurality of attributes presented to the user through a user interface.

The combination of attributes defines a persona for the character. At least one of either an audio presentation and/or a visual image presentation is provided to the user interface. The presentations presented are selected from a plurality of presentations based on the character's persona.

Data related to character attributes are stored in a database. One or more of the presentations presented to the user may be interactive, in that it allows for the user to make choices.

In response to a user's interaction with the interactive presentation, additional audio presentation and/or a visual image presentation is provided to the user interface. Data indicative of user interaction with the interactive presentations is also stored in a database.

What a fucking joke.

notahacker• 13 years ago

Trust me, it gets worse:

All in all, contemporary web sites are static in nature in that they fail to take into consideration the individuality of their visitors and instead present to each visitor a substantially identical audio/visual experience. As a result, visitors to contemporary web sites often become bored with the web site in a relatively short time thereby reducing visitor time on a web site and the possibility of frequent, repeat visits by the user.

It's slightly worrying that patent lawyers and people working at the patent office don't seem to have had access to the internet recently.

nknighthb• 13 years ago

I can read that patent one of two ways. Either it's perfectly novel gibberish, or most of its claims are preempted by Meridian 59. Or possibly even some more limited early-90s graphical MUDs.

robomartin2• 13 years ago

This is the kind of crap that makes me not want to be in the software business. Every time I read about a software patent incident and go off to read the patent my jaw drops to the floor. None. Not one of the hundreds of software patents I have ever reviewed should have been granted. Not one. These things are not inventions. They are implementations based on choices and decisions made by an individual or a team. The patent office is a lunatic asylum. Unbelievable.

I really think we are at a point where the tech community needs to send a super-strong message to both create awareness and catalyze rapid change. This issue could be resolved in one session of Congress with the invalidation of all software patents, current and future.

What to do? All web companies and game developers ought to agree on a date and have a carefully crafted message displayed to every one of their users. The message should be blocking. In other words, for a full minute (a minute of silence for the killing of innovation) you cannot play your game, cannot search the web, cannot use a service, etc.

Taken further, those who have the balls would suspend the entirety of their services for an hour. How much of a stir would be created if Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and others all displayed a page explaining the problem and demanding action for a full hour. I can't think of a better way to force the issue and quite literally have every human being on this planet and every media outlet pickup the topic.

Everyone would learn about the damage being caused by software patents. Politicians would have no choice but to seriously address the issue. I would further suggest that this protest become a monthly event until such time as the issue is dealt with sensibly.

Can this be organized? What else could we do? It really is time to force a national dialog about this. How much more of this do you guys want to endure?

ultramundane828• 13 years ago

I love this idea, and think it's the winning move.

A problem I see is in the details, where I wouldn't want to lose X million dollars just to force a dialogue. If I were the entire decision-making branch of Amazon, I would only dedicate X million dollars to something guaranteed to produce change, like deploying numerous robots (or whatever).

chao-2• 13 years ago

The other caveat is that, although a number of bigger companies have gotten on board the anti-troll train lately (particular props to Newegg and Rackspace), the most popular of services from the largest of companies already have substantial legal teams. They run a higher risk (e.g. Amazon losing sales) for a problem they have already "solved" for themselves, albeit with an equally-expensive solution of a legal team.

famo2• 13 years ago

A good old strike is not a bad idea.

throwawaykf4• 13 years ago

Well... all engineering is simply "implementations based on choices and decisions made by an individual or a team"... What do you think inventions should be, if not that?

At least your take on it is more in tune with reality than the common misconception that patents cover "abstract ideas". The law views abstraction differently than we do(and really, even the Supreme Court doesn't know how to define it other than "we know it when we see it."

However, I'd like to know: what exactly is it that you think this patent covers, and what about it do you find "unbelieveable"? Not that this is a stellar patent, but from most of the comments on this thread, it is amply clear most here don't know how patents work.

chao-2• 13 years ago

Not that this is a stellar patent, but from most of the comments on this thread, it is amply clear most here don't know how patents work.

Which comments are you referring to, what do they not understand about patents, and what makes that fact so "amply clear"?

At time of your writing, there are 18 comments in this thread (including your own), four of which comment on the patent directly. All except the grandparent are quite terse. One links to the patent, two express outrage but do not analyze the patent's content directly, and only one (by nknighthb) seems to make a claim about the validity of the patent with a direct reason.

You have a good point: That people have developed a knee-jerk outrage against patents without necessarily considering a number of related issues (e.g. claims and the system by which a patent is deemed to have been infringed). I ask for clarification because your own comment seems to have been a reactionary assumption to a type of comment which, as of yet, hasn't really entered the thread.

gamblor956• 13 years ago

It's unbelievable because (1) the patent is in no way tied to a physical system as required by US Patent law, (2) is merely a generic and obvious collection of related activities and basic processes, and (3) is invalid based on at least a decade of prior art that predates the patent.

Do you understand that the patent, as written, would lay claim to the basic functionality of every MMO ever released? That is quite literally lays claim to the character selection screens that have been around since Ultima Online (as the patent limits itself to networked game, earlier SP games are not relevant), which came out in 1997?

This isn't an old patent--it was filed November 2010.

robomartin2• 13 years ago

I reviewed the claims and, as is frequently the case, nothing there screams "invention" but rather "implementation".

I don't know what you do. There could be an issue of context here. All I can say is that from the context of someone like me there's very little in software development that deserves a patent these days, of ever.

In fact, I'll go farther than that: Having any kind of patent granted should almost be exponentially more difficult with the passage of time. As technology develops and we, as a species, learn and become more adept most engineering falls under implementation rather than invention.

What's the difference? If I take the same problem and give it to five different people skilled in the art and they can pretty much rattle off a proposed implementation in short order, it's umplementation, not invention.

In this particular case the claims start of by describing a networked game where users can choose characters and their attributes via a UI and their selections are stored in a database. It goes on from there. If you read it as an engineer there's absolutely nothing there that was "invented". If you read it as a lawywer, well, almost anything is possible.

rthomas6• 13 years ago

Game theory (and possibly anti-collusion laws) dictates that the best course of action for any one website in a sector is to keep their website up. If I'm Bing, and Google, DDG, Blekko, etc. shut down, that's exactly the time that I want to be up and running. So even though this is a good idea, I don't think it will happen. At least not all at once like this.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

Targeting users is pointless. No consumer is going to call up their senator and demand reforms to patent law. They just don't care. The thing to understand is that patent trolls did not create the existing regime. They're opportunists, but they have no money or lobbying power behind them. It was the IBMs of the world that brought software patents to the fore. It's companies like that that perpetuate the regime. Imagine you're a senator: you see Apple and Samsung spend millions litigating over some patents. What is your takeaway, as a non-technical person? It must be really important...

It's the tech giants that must be persuaded to lobby hard for patent reform. These are the people who can fix the regime: http://techpost.bsa.org/2013/02/22/clear-thinking-on-softwar..., because these are the people who Congressmen consider to be the "experts" on the tech sector whose opinion they value.

jmduke• 13 years ago

To clarify: the Treehouse in this article is not http://teamtreehouse.com/, the technology education startup founded by Ryan Carson (whose posts make it to HN rather often.)

pvnick• 13 years ago

Oh thank God. I really like him.

famo2• 13 years ago

I'm surprised Ryan hasn't received an infringement letter from Treehouse over the name Treehouse.

jimrhoskins• 13 years ago

This made me look twice, as I work for (Team) Treehouse. Coincidentally, the last company I worked for was called Avatar International, so the company in the article "Treehouse Avatar Technologies" made me do an extra double take.

rdl• 13 years ago

I wonder if it would prejudice the courts against you later if your response were simply a timestamped picture of a very X-rated "furry" or other x-rated avatar from an early-1990s MUD or something.

Lasher• 13 years ago

I've been playing and running text-based MMOS (MUDs) that do this same thing since the early 1990s. Probably a naive question but isn't there anything that can be done to void these by proving that this was being done on the internet for long before they came around?

josephwegner• 13 years ago

Man, I used to love both Minions of Mirth and A Tale in the Desert. The management at Prairie Games had kinda gone to hell, but the original founders were really pretty awesome people.

Such a bummer to see great games get bullied.

wyck• 13 years ago

Someone needs to send Judge Otis D. after Lerner, David, Littenberg, Krumholz, & Menlik, LLP.

Ref: http://www.popehat.com/2013/05/06/does-prenda-believe-in-no-...

Hoff• 13 years ago

From 1994, if it helps...

"ACM Flight Simulator, revision 4.7

What is ACM? ------------

ACM is a LAN-oriented, multiplayer aerial combat simulation. My main design objective was to provide source code that could be easily compiled and executed on a wide variety of platforms. To that end, acm is written entirely in C, exploiting the programming features of Unix, X11, and the BSD socket interface.

Players engage in air to air combat against one another using heat seeking missiles and cannons.

ACM is implemented as two programs. The first, named "acm", is a small program that, when invoked, starts a flight session on a given workstation.

The second component, named "acms", is a server process that manages the multiplayer environment. It also manages the flight simulation and display management that is required. Most players will prefer to run the acms process on a back-end server system on their local area network. Players at client workstations can then invoke the acm program to begin play."

smegel• 13 years ago

"Methods for Presenting Data Over a Network Based Network User Choices and Collecting Real-time Data Related to Said Choices."

Maybe someone should just patent the general method for the operation of a computer by feeding it a series of instructions combined with user input and a way to present output, and we can all go and start new careers.

Three More MMO Developers Receive Letters from Treehouse Attorneys

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