Lots of noise in the patent world lately, especially in the realm of apps and social games. Lodsys is making headlines for suing a litany of small app developers, as well as super-successful game developer Rovio, for a rather broad patent. As of Monday, Zynga was officially added to the list of companies attacked by patent trolls, though not by Lodsys.
Segan LLC, a company with no website and no products aside from broad patents, is suing Zynga for infringement of a patent in a “System for viewing content over a network and method therefor”. The title of the patent is actually broader than the claims of the patent, though as you will see below, the claim is rather broad as well. In case you aren’t familiar with software patents, here is the pertinent claim, below. If your eyes glaze over and you can’t figure out what this means, that simply indicates that you are normal:
What is claimed is:
1. A system comprising: a user device having a processor and comprising: a browser program capable of being run on said processor for viewing website pages; a graphical user interface (GUI) application capable of being run on said processor, containing a proprietary communication protocol and providing a GUI for depicting a character icon; and a unique identifier for identifying the user of the user device; a service provider for maintaining a user record corresponding to said user, for communicating with said GUI application by means of said proprietary communication protocol, for authorizing the GUI application to depict the character icon, and for providing one or more previously enabled character enhancements for the user’s character icon depicted in the authorized GUI application, wherein said user record comprises identification of the user’s character icon, predetermined user preferences, and the one or more previously enabled character enhancements; and a target website for offering a new character enhancement for the user’s character icon, wherein the new character enhancement is capable of being enabled in the user’s record at the service provider without requiring user interaction with the service provider, and wherein the character enhancements are obtained per predefined authorization rules from the service provider and/or the target website in addition to the predetermined user references; and wherein, when the user visits the target website using the browser program, the target website uses the unique identifier on the user device to access the user’s record at the service provider without requiring user interaction with the service provider, whereby any new character enhancement offered to the user is appropriate for the user’s character icon.
To really boil that down, the patent covers the concept of putting a new item on an avatar in an online setting. The description is more illustrative of the purpose of the “invention”:
Illustratively, a user may be interested in acquiring fishing-theme enhancements for one character icon, and baseball-theme enhancements for another character icon.
For one, this patent covers something that seems completely obvious now, and almost every social game has some version of this incentive system. Just off the top of my head, I know Yahoo! does something similar with their avatars, Xbox Live uses avatars, every fashion-themed social game on Facebook uses avatars, and every cafe-themed game uses avatars. This could be an extremely damaging patent if asserted against every one of these companies.
The whole patent is pretty ridiculous; the idea of accessorizing a doll has been around forever, and the fact that you can use the concept to incentivize activity on a website isn’t much of a leap from early video games that did the same. Diablo is the earliest example I can think of off the top of my head – it incentivized further play by allowing you to change the appearance of your character through the acquisition of new items, and it still came out four years before the patent was filed. Moving that activity from a single computer to an online interaction between a user, a GUI, and a website ought not to create a patentable “invention”.
To get more technical, I’m not even certain I understand how the patent reads on what Zynga does in a game like Farmville. There’s lots of potential for the patent to be read in a way that doesn’t implicate what Zynga does, depending on the definition of some of the specific terms. But the problem with patent suits is that, even if Zynga decides it is worth it to fight the case rather than settle, the suit could go on for a very long time even after the district court chooses the definitions for those specific terms. An appeals court would get to redefine the same terms, and the entire district court decision could be irrelevant as a result. This is why patent trolling is so effective – big companies would rather pay a small settlement than risk years of legal fees. We will see what Zynga does, and we will see if Segan LLC goes after any of the other major game developers who do essentially the same thing.
danielmarkmiller.net 