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3D Game Lawsuit

[Nov 01, 2004, 9:58 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

GameDAILY BIZ (thanks HomeLAN Fed) reports that a dozen major game publishers are being sued by Texas-based law firm McKool Smith for infringing on a patent they hold: "Method and Apparatus for Spherical Planning." They are making the case that the patent covers displaying 3D images on a monitor, and an employee of one of the publishers, quoted under the promise of anonymity, says the case is "ridiculously broad... It's an abuse of the legal system," but also: "They might have a leg to stand on from a legal standpoint. It's not impossible that McKool Smith will win. A lot of very smart people are taking this very seriously." The dozen publishers named in the suit are Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Activision, Atari, THQ, Vivendi Universal Games, Sega, Square Enix, Tecmo, LucasArts, and Namco Hometek. Apparently several smaller companies are also being threatened with legal action.

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28.

Re: let it play out in court

Nov 2, 2004, 00:52

Orogogus

suppose the companies are using patented techniques? if they are then what they have done is warezed the patent and have to be held libel. I don't care a whit about the patent holders or the gaming companies...esp EA. I just think it odd that so many shorts are in bundles over this but I have never read at this board where anyone condones warez. It's because none of us seriously believe that all these big name software companies were unable to create their own 3D engines without stealing from some firm in Texas. My impression, and I assume everyone else's, is that McKool simply took a simple idea and got some fool to approve the patent, then started suing anyone who arrived at the idea independently. Let's check the US patent office. http://tinyurl.com/6284m A graphics display terminal performs a pan operation with respect to a view motion center to effectuate spherical panning, thereby providing perspective and non-perspective views. Three dimensional instructions stored in terminal memory are re-transformed in accordance with a panned direction. Also a zoom feature is provided so that displayed images may be magnified as desired. That's pretty stupid.

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