Activision Blizzard Being Sued for Virtual World Infringement

You put your coding finger precisely on problem 1.

Problem 2 is lawyers.

Problem 3 is legislators. Please feel free to change the order of problems 2 and 3.

Ok, has  WoW been using this world since the beginning (some years now) or just recently have they migrated to what these guys say is theirs? If they have been using it all along (WoW in its present form was released in 2004) then has there been communication since then? Or are these folks (probably at the advice of their lawyers) suddenly saying, "You know, they have nicked your code." I have a lot of doubt for someone who knew there was a new game in town of the genre they program for and not made sure it wasn't "borrowing". I suspect also some lawyers are at the root. Next it will be Everquest and LOTRO and who knows what (these are just the games I know and there are some similarities in their "worlds")

Where to draw the line? Will Blizzard stand up to bullying or pay them off? How about SOE? If they decide a game like EQII has done the same thing then you can kiss that one good-bye. I doubt if it has even began to be recovered from last years account disaster.

I hate the US law system. Too many big-bottomed lawyers - women as well as men - are looking all the time for where they big but is and who then can sue instead of who they can serve. Anyone notice that a short time after a drug is released and being advertized that the lawyers are advertising class action suits even if the only thing anyone did was forget to dot an "i".  So I don't believe a bit of it if a company has waited 8 years to sue.

Most people probably don't realize how bad this really is, and how worse it's becoming.

For instance, some time ago there were news about a famous patent troll (Lodsys) threatening to sue *individual* iOS developers over the technology used to, get this, 'click a button on an application and be taken to a web site' (e.g.; every 'Buy Now' button in existence). *Everyone* does this in one way or another, and there is obviously prior-art.

The fact that there is prior-art (and that the patent is therefore invalid) is absolutely meaningless, however: to prove that there is prior-art, you must do it in a patent friendly court of law, and be willing - and, more importantly, able - to spend a minimum of hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight for your cause. Because you will be defending yourself in a jurisdiction that has a clear bias to upholding existing patents, there is the very real risk of losing, in which case the whole shebang falls down on you!

Small developers had no way to fight this, so they had no choice but to settle. Some reached out for help to the ones who *could* fight Lodsys: Microsoft, Apple and Google. The problem is that LodSys is a company exclusively dedicated to buying patents and then extracting royalties from others. As such, all the giants had already signed deals with Lodsys for patents in bulk - with a clause in the contract that prevented them from litigating with Lodsys. So their hands were tied.

Lodsys then started going after small PC developers.

Now get this: if you settle with Lodsys to avoid being sued, even if the patent is later overturned, you still have to keep paying them royalties anyway. If you don't settle, you get sued.

This is nothing but a legalized extortion racket.

Translation = Utter scumbags!

OT: Isn't money and the never ending pursuit of it absolutely awesome. I read that an MIT study projects that global financial collapse will occur in 2030, at which point, things are going to get very real. Maybe it's one of those things that conspiracy theorists and doomsayers look forward to reading about, or maybe there's an element of truth to it. On a kind of related note, a friend of mine once pointed out this very thing was going to happen sooner or later, and he directed my attention to something called "The Venus Project". I highly doubt that it would work for a number of reasons, but at least someone's proposing an alternative to how things are now.

You mean like taxes?

Taxes are a necessary evil that benefits everyone. This only benefits the patent troll companies, in detriment of everyone else.

Yes. I understand that. But there are times when you have to stop and ask yourself WTF when prices start climbing after taxes are raised and raised yet again. I don't mind paying for stuff but it does get a bit ridiculous after awhile.

Back OT before I get billed for hijacking. lol

It will occur long before then, given much of the world hasn't recovered from the last one and Chinese growth bubble's not too far off bursting.  When that happens these patent scavengers will get jack shit cos the cash flow will have dried up across the board.

And if anybody thinks the last GFC was bad, the next one will be significantly worse and prolonged.

Very true. Add to that, my partner was telling me about an article she read the other day. Apparently a lot of the major banking corporations haven't learned a damn thing, and neither have people. It hasn't quite got to the point were mortgages are being given to those who can't afford them, but subprime auto loans and credit cards are once again being given to those who are obviously a high risk. But then again, given the number of people struggling to get by, it's unsurprising that they would damn near tear the arm off of anyone who offers them any sort of money. X amount of money now, and worry about how you're going to pay it back later.

And here we go again...

Since Nike started in and headquarters in Oregon, we had several people in an uproar about Nike using Chinese plants. Yeh, duh. These are the plants that necessitated the damning of the Ganges river and burying flooding priceless artifacts. These are the plants, while giving people a boost in income they well could use, at the same time throws away people who get disabled while doing the things they require. No safety gear, no fire protection, no insurance (no medical care anyway) All of this documented long before it hit the news. Then they point fingers at the companies that used the same plant and the one down the road in a "they do it too" type response. Now they say, "we didn't know that" and point fingers at the factory. Don't you love "made in America"? As long as a certain percentage of the stuff is made in the USA, then they can call it "Made in America".

Pretty soon everything in America will say "Made in China" because nobody can afford to work for those wages. Don't get me started about the Panama Canal and the US government in their great wisdom.

The thing is, there is no need for the arse end to fall out of the major economies.  There are significantly wealthy people who are sitting on cash in abundance, who could plow some back into the communities from which their wealth was derived, but alas, those massive fortunes will continue to collect dust in various bank vaults around the world until some bright spark triggers better economic times for investors once again.

Oh, and did I ever tell you that I despise bankers with a passion, rivaled only by my complete dislike for lawyers, real estate salesmen, politicians and other rich bastards driven by greed??  With a bit of luck many of them will perform highrise swan dives like those performed on Wall St during the Great depression.

Q. What do you throw a drowning banker?

A. If you don't have a sack of pennies an anvil will do.

Ah, Starkers, I like you because you speak your mind, but I don't agree with that last part, at least not the way you generalize it. It's phrased as if the wealthy guy owes something to the community, i.e.; as if he obtained his wealth fraudulently. That might be true in some cases, but you would be surprised how most of the 'new money' is actually made of guys who work their butts off (workaholic) and don't stop working just as hard even when they become wealthy.

Assuming the wealthy guy did not deceive anyone to get where he is, then he doesn't owe *anything* to *anybody*. He earned his fortune fair and square: the community transferred money to him willingly, in exchange for a product or service he created.

Furthermore, this guy created wealth around him by giving rise to *sustainable* jobs. Compare this to those who win millions in the lottery and then generally squander it all away in just a handful of years, with nothing good coming out of it.

So, for a guy like this, it's not fair to say that he 'owes' something to the community, or to tell him what he should or should not do with *his* money. If he decides to give some of it away to those who need it the most (but keep in mind this is not always good, since you should teach people to fish instead of just giving them a fish), kudos for him and we should all be grateful for it. But if he decides to keep it all for himself, well, it's his money, so it's his decision to make as well.

I hate being able to see both sides of the story. Its a vicious cycle. Haves and have nots. unfortunately today the have nots have grown because of the economy being as shitty as it is. Many of the programs put in place to help them are either corrupt or woefully underfunded or in danger of being cancelled altogether. I know...I'm living it. I got lucky...enough people believed in me so I got another shot at it. But there are so many who are denied because the funding is drying up. The program I'm in closed for the year because their funding isn't enough to carry them through.

Being able to see both sides of the story is a good thing.

I also hate what is being done to the middle class (of which I am a part of) and how their rights and buying power are slowly being stripped away. But trust me, you guys in the US still have it good when compared to places like Portugal and Greece, for instance. Judging by the way things are going, not sure how long that will last, though.

However, there is one thing people should be aware of: distributing all the wealth in the world to everybody would not make anyone rich, it would just make everybody poor.

When Spain conquered most of South America back in 1500, it had a HUGE influx of gold. Think that made everyone in Spain wealthy? Think again: inflation shot up in instead, and the price of *everything* tripled. But that was not the only effect: Spanish goods became uncompetitive on the foreign markets, and the Spanish themselves began buying foreign products, resulting in a lot of money living the country, which only made things worse.

Inflation happens because of the law of supply and demand, when a sharply increasing amount of money is chasing after a relatively fixed output of goods and services. Because the output is fixed and there is not enough for everybody, prices go up.

This is also what happened with the housing bubble: since nearly everyone could now buy a house (even those who could not afford one), prices went up and up and up. The whole thing came crashing down when those who could not afford one in the first place started defaulting on their mortgages.

So, not everything that glitters is gold.

I think we're talking about two different types of people here, Jorge.  However, I thoroughly agree with what you're saying about the person who works their butt off and is honest in their business dealings.  These people generally are not the uber rich assholes who'd steal their mothers purse for a grub stake to turn a profit.  I've known people who became millionaires through their own, honest endeavours, people who employ others at a fair wage, but they are not the stinking rich parasites I spoke of above. No, the people I referred to are the uber rich bankers and businessmen... the entrepreneurs whose enormous wealth was inherited from old family money and who wouldn't give a flu sufferer a used tissue.

Yup, there's a difference between a millionaire with a working class background and one who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  The former remembers his roots and appreciates his rank and file workers, whereas the latter generally is too far up himself to care about anyone but himself.  I've worked for both types and I can say without reservation that the former was a better and more generous boss, whereas the latter was always as tight as a fishes bum and fought tooth and nail against the possibility of pay rises/better working conditions.

An example of what I'm talking about would be Brad Wardell vs Donald Trump, who has been deemed the stingiest, tightest billionaire ever, more than once, and is highly arrogant with it.  Brad may have a successful business and buck or plenty more than me, but I would not call him rich by any means, and from what I can tell he is a decent and honest businessman who rewards effort and loyalty accordingly, something I very much doubt is in Trump.