Microsoft Sued over Xbox Live

fiorenza writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Paltalk has sued Microsoft in the Eastern District of Texas over its Xbox Live service. The suit alleges that Microsoft's Xbox Live infringes on two of its patents, and that the company has suffered damages 'in at least the tens of millions of dollars,' which raises obvious questions about why they waited four years to file the suit (Xbox Live was launched in late 2002)." From the article: "Microsoft, as a company that runs multiplayer game servers, is alleged to be violating these patents. It's not clear how they're doing so--the initial complaint provides literally no evidence of Microsoft's guilt. The filing instead describes the Paltalk patents and the dates that Xbox Live went, err, live. After five pages of this, Paltalk simply claims that "gameplay on the Xbox or Xbox 360 through the Xbox Live online gaming service infringes the Paltalk patents," then goes on to ask for a jury trial. Presumably, actual information will be released once the trial begins."

Patent apparently about internet audioconferencing

[SEMW]

Paltalk is a company that makes an addon for AOL, Yahoo, and ICQ that apparently "enhances the traditional instant message and chat room functionality you know and love with state-of-the-art voice and video that you'll enjoy with all your senses", including the equivalent of multiple-user audio/video-conferencing in chat rooms and instant messages. Presumably, then, they are going after the in-game chatting ability in X-box live. If this is true (though don't take it as read, I'm not a patent lawyer), it seems utterly baseless -- or at least, an obvious extension to an already existing technology, which is pretty much the same thing.

Re:actual information?

[TubeSteak]

Last I checked, SCO v. IBM was in the terminal stage of the discovery process & SCO is in the position where they must put up or STFU.

They really don't have many more options to drag things out.

IIRC, SCO is fighting the Judge's decision(s) on IBM's motion(s) to dismiss/limit various aspects of the case... a motion IBM could make because SCO has yet to show any proof.

Anyways, trial is set for Feb 2007. If the judge hasn't forced something substantive out of SCO in the next 6 months, I imagine it won't be much of a trial.

Does /. not know how to read anymore?

[Janthkin]

From TFA: "The two patents at issue are the '523 patent and the '686 patent, both of which involve server-group messaging."

I read every comment that was posted prior to starting to write this. Lots of babble about "Oh, Battle.net predates this" and "it must be about voice over Live". Read, people!

The '523 patent, from a cursory reading of the one independent claim, looks to involve transmissions from a collection of host computers (think individual Xboxen), back to a central server, where the data is aggregated, and then returned to one of the host computers. Interesting bit is that it's dealing with a unicast network and payloads, which doesn't sound like packet-based transmission. See the long, boring words of the patent for more details.

The '686 is an extremely narrow-looking patent, addressing the creation of a "group" of computers for messaging purposes. See Claim 1 - there are 6 ennumerated elements, each with subconditions, and a final non-ennumerated element; infringement would have to touch each and every one of these elements.