My favorite part is the part that it says the patent was filed in 1994.
So, they basically sat on a patent for 10 years before doing anything with it. Which of course didn't involve their own service or product, just suing someone who HAD made a successful product. Wish patents had a productivity expiration date. License or make something within a specific amount of time or lose the patent.

Judges do not award patents, the US Patent Office does in the case of America. This case isn't before the court yet. A patent this vague will most likely be struck down or repealed considering these idiots are up against Microsoft and Sony with the world's worst patent idea.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous that people can patent such vague ideas without even showing any proof of concept. I think the problem is that most judges aren't even remotely tech-savvy so they have no idea what any of these tech patents actually mean.

"communicating live while playing the same videogame in separate locations"

I don't understand why these cases go anywhere. A patent like this should not be awarded in the first place, you may develop a method for doing this but so can anyone else with a basic knowledge of programming. Fuck, AT&T infringes on this if 2 people call each other while playing a game. Games that use modems to connect to each other infringe on this if they let you chat. It's easy to see why a patent would get issued like this, there have to be millions of patents being submitted all the time, but why does a judge look at this and not revoke the patent as bullshit?

Playing devils advocate how do you protect a piece of software fairly? When anyone can essentially copy your work and make their own version how do you keep your inventions safe? And are software programs inventions? They deserve copyrights in some cases but functions you find in one software appear in another all the time so at what point should a patent protect something but not something else?

This comment was edited on Jul 2, 2009, 12:20.