a system and method ... for preventing unauthorized access to electronic data stored on an electronic device.
It is not known at this time what, if anything, this means for Mojang. Of note, Markus "Notch" Persson has certainly voiced his opinion on the matter, stating that he "will throw piles of money at making sure they don't get a cent". Little else is known about the lawsuit at this time.
Notch has made the lawsuit PDF available for viewing, which you can see by clicking here. He has also posted a detailed write-up on his perspective on software patents - you can view it by clicking here.
Uniloc appears to be suing numerous other gaming producers allegedly violating this patent, including Square Enix, Electronic Arts and others.
Any further specifics of the case will be covered as they develop.
UPDATE: Ric Richardson has posted his views on the situation as well, which you can read by clicking here. It is important to note that Mr. Richardson has had no direct part in the lawsuit of Uniloc vs. Mojang.
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This week, David and Toby talk about Minecon 2012, Creeper clothes and other awesome Minecraftiness - check it out!
district and elsewhere in Texas, including at least claim 107, without the consent or authorization
of Uniloc, by or through making, using, offering for sale, selling and/or importing Android based
applications for use on cellular phones and/or tablet devices that require communication with a
server to perform a license check to prevent the unauthorized use of said application, including,
but not limited to, Mindcraft." is the lawsuit.
The game is not mindcraft its minecraft
Assuming you read this anyways, they are able to sue because they filed a patent. A patent is basically the idea of something and is filed so that if someone uses something that falls under the particular patent, the owner of the patent has right to demand royalties. A royalty is basically a set sum of money in order to use the certain product, such as if you were to do a play in school, you would need to pay royalties to do a commercial production because someone else owns the play. Really the company has the right to sue any company that uses authentication methods and makes money. Though it's a very sleezy thing for them to do considering how vague the patent is in the first place.
it happens. and a fair bit of patent suits come from a company doing the following to make money:
1: file obscure, general patent.
2: sue anyone you think falls under it.
3: hope you win
called patent fraud.
however:
that was called WWI and WWII. essentially 1 on (everyone else)
"Mindcraft" is not a Mojang product. unfortunatly lawsuit still isnt void because of the "including, but not limited to" phrase, which extends to include all products from Majong. still, learn to spell. makes you look educated.
according to a previous post:
patent expired 7 years ago in '05. now free to copy/download/use. cant sue for what isnt yours.
this isnt going anywhere.
and seeing as i live in good ole TX, hope unilock can dodge creepers and 5ft+ rattlers. and bullets. he shows up again, it will be the lynch mobs all over again.
Here's hoping for the best mojang.
I also think that this company is being a patent troll, due the the fact that they are and have been suing so many other game developers for the same reason. I am certain that Unilock will fail. As someone else (I'm to lazy to go back and find out) said, "They be trollin'."
There have been entire defenses built around lack of prior enforcement of a patent or other IP. That was the reason why Bethesda sued mojang, because they couldn't not enforce it. I fail to see why these guys should get any money when they have done such a ****-poor job protecting their patents that almost every program ever created uses it.
It doesn't matter if Mojang and 99% of the users are not in eastern Texas where this lawsuit is being filed. All that matters is that at least one user in that part of the world. The Austin, Texas area has a bunch of technology companies BTW, which is one of the reasons why lawsuits have been filed in that federal jurisdiction. There is legal precedence for lawsuits like this in that district federal court so it is a little bit more predictable in terms of the outcome, especially for somebody suing for patent infringement.
I agree it is forum shopping, but it is also perfectly legal. That is one of the things that sort of sucks if you decide to get into global distribution of products, where almost anybody anywhere can file a lawsuit against you. Mojang could blow off somebody filing a lawsuit in Tuvalu or Somolia and simply agree not to do business in those countries, but in this case since it is in U.S. federal court, Notch needs to decide if his customers in the USA is something he wants to give up. It isn't a matter of excluding a state, as this lawsuit does have national implications.
Besides, this troll is likely to file a lawsuit in the EU if Notch decides to run from this one. It would be better if he deals with the issue in America instead.
It could be used against Uniloc, but all the lawyer would have to do is go before the judge and simply make a motion to fix the "clerical errors". I would presume these guys are at least semi-intelligent to do such a thing when big bucks are on the line and may even simply be done by the judge himself if push came to shove. That would take a whole minute to deal with in a court room.
Patents, unlike copyright and trademark cases, don't need to show prior enforcement. The presumption is that you should have known better and should have known that the concept was patented before you created whatever it is that you have made.
If you want to see a real troll, look at Unisys and their patent on the LZW algorithm, which happened to be used by the GIF image format and at the time they started to assert patent rights that file format was used by nearly every web browser and graphic image processing program. Initially they planned on filing a lawsuit against every single internet user in the world, but thought better of the idea and instead went after web browser developers, companies like Adobe, and anybody keeping large collections of images.
There is a long history of trolls doing stuff like this, although my quick glance at the patent itself does seem to show some weakness in terms of obviousness. If the ideas in the patent could be independently developed by several other companies without having ever even reading the patent application, it seems like it should have been an obvious application of the technology. In the case of the LZW algorithm, the specific algorithm was published in an ACM Journal article, which the CompuServ developers acknowledged was the source of their inspiration for how they implemented their image format algorithm. That article didn't disclose that the algorithm was patent pending, but it was patented by the article author so the obviousness wasn't nearly so big of an issue.
In the case of the Uniloc patent and this lawsuit, it is being asserted that authenticating that somebody purchased a license for Minecraft from Mojang and returning a hashed number to indicate that the user has a valid copy of Minecraft is somehow patentable. If there was a specific hash function involved that seemed non-obvious but was very efficient and using some custom network system that wasn't just a mobile phone network... I might agree that would be patentable. To take an obvious idea and say "to be used on mobile devices" as the basis for a patent seems to be so obvious that it makes my head explode as to what is unique about the patented idea. As if somebody could think that using an authentication system on a mobile device is somehow different than what you use on a normal desktop computer. Right.
Hello fellow uniloc supporter!
+TROLL FACE+
Yeah. It deff went to his head and started suing millions of other people...... Trololololo
edit
Lol does he mean Mojang, not Majong? Lol he doesnt even know how to spell mojang
I think he realizes he's losing money, so he's spelling everything wrong to annoy everybody. He's gonna lose anyways.
And then he trys to be all so' oh so goody goody angel i do NOTHING wrong! :D' in his posts, and says ' Oh i live a simple life! ' YEAH right after you made millions of dollars long ago?
Why the hell are they suing Mojang? Are they doing it for the money?
Why are you doing this then? ********.
Show them you will fight (as you are doing) and they will likely come to you to settle.
example (and watch anyways): http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_troll.html
Try your best to keep the other companies from setting with the patent troll.
Hardware is where you have an idea for a way to build something, say a flying car. Now, clearly you don't want people to copy your design exactly, so you patent it. This is good; it encourages new designs, better designs, and more thinking.
Software, specifically this example, is like saying (randomly and out of the blue, I might add) "I came up with protecting my user's information first, pay me!" It clearly wasn't meant to work this way, but you can twist the legal sense to mean this.
That aside, practically every company on the internet uses protection against piracy. By the logic presented, Uniloc should be suing the following and more:
Edit:
A TED talk on this? Wow. That kind of beats out anything I had written immediately, good job.