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The VW blogosphere is alight, today, regarding Worlds.com, whose two patents, apparently filed in the mid-90s and awarded in the early 00s, are now presumably to be the basis of claims against virtual world, MMO game engine and other platform providers. The said patents are here and here, made handily available by Google. They describe (in somewhat nebulous terms) the basic principles of running an MMO grid and doing object and avatar culling prior to rendering -- something all scaleable VW and game grids now do. Did they really invent this stuff? Hmmmm ... By the mid-90s, the semantic basis for avatar and object culling was well understood as essential to scaling and playability, and had been implemented in a de-facto way as far back as 1983, in first-generation text-based multi-user games like Simutronics' Gemstone II. These early games used 'rooms' as nodal containers to restrict domains of avatar visibility and interaction, but made rooms permeable to admit adjacency effects -- enabling (for example) the possibility that someone "shouting" (e.g., >yell 'Hello) in one room could be heard in connected rooms. They also -- rather than forcing full-content room updates to every avatar connected to a node -- made certain objects accessible only on demand, via 'examine' and other interactive commands. It seems obvious to apply these same architectural semantics (at some higher level of abstraction) to 3D worlds, particularly since the demands they make on clients for rendering and on pipes for bandwidth and on processes for atomicity and synch are so much greater. So ... when you're in Warcraft, and another avatar runs away from you, once they get a certain number of meters out, they disappear. On a continuous landscape, 'rooms' move around, and their extents are dynamically computed using a battery of heuristics, but ... dude, they're still rooms. Except in the real world of patents and courtrooms, things aren't always so simple. About twelve years ago, a guy named Ron Katz pulled a deal in the telecom business, filing claims to have invented all sorts of computer-telephony stuff. Everybody laughed at first. You can't patent activating a credit-card over the phone via ANI! That's the kind of trivial application ANI was invented to enable! It's like -- given the word processor, trying to patent the notion of typing a memo (as opposed to a love letter) on a word processor. Get out of here! Hah, hah, hah. Katz even had a history of patent trolling, having claimed a decade previous to have invented word-wrap on text editors. Hah, hah, hah. Then Katz pulled a deal with MCI, getting him the financial backing he required to litigate at scale. And ten years later, the telecom industry -- including companies like AT&T and IBM -- have all settled, to the tune of more than $750 million dollars. Hah, hah, hah. So you have to take this stuff seriously. The only practical way to refute claims like this is with firm documentation of prior art, which basically means (easier) proving that somebody else patented this first or (much harder) proving that at the time these patents were filed, there were (ideally) numerous examples of the process in use, such that any practitioner of the art would typically be aware of their existence. That latter approach often turns out to be a very tall order. In highly social, competitive innovative spaces (e.g., online gaming, virtual worlds) folks forge ahead with innovating, share promiscuously, re-invent each others' ideas, and keep the secret sauce (like the actual guts of 3D culling algorithms) proprietary, often failing to do the boring work of patent-filing in favor of the much more interesting work of getting products to market, growing the customer base and increasing market share and investor value. So it can be amazingly difficult, in retrospect, to document prior art assertions. And even if documentation of prior art (of an unimpeachable sort) can be found, communicating it to judges, juries and the Patent Office can be very challenging. Remember the last time you tried to explain Second Life camera controls to a noob? Now try explaining avatar culling to 12 of them. So -- are these claims valid? It occurs to me that virtual worlds are ideal tools for turning many minds to one purpose: either to help substantiate or help vitiate these claims. I therefore propose to hold the first-ever Worlds.com Prior Art Dance Party, on World2Worlds, on Friday, January 2, at 9 PM ET. Music by me. Prior art by you. Drag all your old game-programmer, online geek and IP attorney friends inworld, and come prepared for grandstanding and casuistry!
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