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| One of the game companies being sued |
The idea of software patents is in my opinion a sketchy one altogether. Nevertheless, they are the quite scary reality of today.
The latest story to catch my eye regarding this is that Walker Digital is suing Activision Inc, Activision Publishing, Activision Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment and Zynga over a patent describing "a method and a system for a distributed electronic tournament system in which many remotely located players participate in a tournament through input/output devices connected to a central controller which manages the tournament."
It's one of the vaguer patents I've seen, but they got it accepted back in 2002 apparently, and now they're trying to cash in. To me that patent describes pretty much any online game of today, and certainly also many games predating 2002.
We'll have to wait and see how this turns out.
Looking at this (unrelated) story it seems there's no limit to what one can apply for a patent of.
Now I just have to hope that no one has patented writing a blog entry about patents...
All the best
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