As most of you who read Penny Arcade or the rest of the Internet are aware of, a fairly big lawsuit to the gaming industry was filed Christmas Eve 2008 by Worlds.com against NCSoft, makers of popular MMO’s like City of Heroes and Lineage. The suit claims that NCSoft violates a patent held by Worlds for “Interaction in a 3D Enviroment” with avatars, pictures, and chat, to summarize.

I call this Patent Abuse. I call it because companies like these file these patents and pretty much sit on them, waiting for the time when other companies go through with tech related to it, that they can bring it out and make quick cash, much like the RIAA used music piracy to pad its coffers over the past decade. Sure, Worlds is the rare example where they apparently are publishing software or services based on the patent as a company, to singers and rappers it seems, but the collective power of every MMO developer as well as countless numbers of other software publishers has outdone anything they have made over the past decade and a half. Even if they filed the patent in 1995, it was not even granted until 2007, they should not have any legal authority on anything made before then, right? Sadly I lack real understanding of how the patent system works, I think it is outdated and a sham really, since “inventions” these days are merely concepts and ideas, often without producing real tangible goods, and with Disney continuing to extend patents beyond that of a human lifespan, nothing truly becomes part of the public and free to work with, almost ever.

The fate of this case is still in the air, but in my opinion, this is just another classic example of bullying in the Microsoft capacity.

tl;dr: Worlds, beware of Activision Blizzard’s Dark Templars. That is all.