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Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

clickerheroes2.com

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Re: Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

#151

Post by brink »

wand3r wrote: post #61
brink wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is murder okay, as long as you're murdering Hitler?"

People need to stop casually invoking Hitler when making serious or semi-serious arguments or analogies. Like, I hate patent trolls and think in game payments are pretty terrible. However lets put those 2 concepts in the same neighborhood. That neighborhood is nowhere near the neighborhood of the systemic annihilation of a population in as ruthless and demeaning a fashion as Hitler did. That neighborhood, to carry th…

My argument wasn't really serious.

Re: Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

#152

Post by chrismcb »

kelnos wrote: post #53
rhizome wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once they get some precedent under their belt. They have to do this via small-time operators first because porn people have money.

If most or all the small-time operators settle, that doesn't set precedent, though, right? A judge isn't going to look at a future case and say "well, all these other companies settled, so seems like the patent is valid". That would be absurd.

Settling doesn't set precedent. Doesn't matter how many settle.

Re: Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

#154

Post by chapill »

crusso wrote: post #96
chapill wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% of the companies in the US incorporate in Delaware. Is that also tail wagging the dog? https://www.delawareinc.com/corporation/

One doesn't move to Delaware simply to register a company there.

Relocate the company, not yourself. I expected the part of my post about working remotely to highlight that.

Re: Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

#155

Post by rayalez »

mmihaly wrote: post #114
fragsworth wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey. Developer of Clicker Heroes here. More examples of prior art are very helpful, so that would help us out a lot. Do you have any examples of any of these MUDs that had virtual currency?

Yeah. I'm the friend he mentioned. Achaea.com was the first game in the world to use virtual currency/goods as its business model, back in 1997. Still live today. My company's at ironrealms.com. I mailed you offering help.

Whoah this is so awesome. Thank you for making such great games!

Amazing who you can see on HN...

Re: Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

#156

Post by jcl »

fragsworth wrote: post #103
Lasher wrote: post #83

I passed this on to a friend of mine who has been doing virtual currency in online games since the mid 1990s (MUDs) and has been called as an expert witness in the past to defeat some of these "virtual currency" patents.

Hey. Developer of Clicker Heroes here. More examples of prior art are very helpful, so that would help us out a lot. Do you have any examples of any of these MUDs that had virtual currency?

FWIW, This w3.org web standard for per-fee-links (dated Aug 1999) describes a micropayment system that can be denominated in arbitrary currencies, giving "airline miles" as one possible example:

https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-Micropayment-Markup/#Appendix%207

Re: Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

#157

Post by ehnto »

MrLeap wrote: post #143
mmihaly wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know the ins and outs of how. I've never been sued by patent trolls. I've been threatened, just responded with some of the evidence I have and a, "Are you sure you really want to do this?" and I never hear from them again. When I've helped defend other companies (two of which are among the largest/most prominent in the games industry), I've just provided expert witness testimony as to the existence of…

You're a good person. I hope a lawyer with your character contacts you about pursuing sanctions for vexatious litigation against these guys. At least invalidating the patent.

How come if they have sued and lost based on prior art, the patent is already invalid?

Re: Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

#158

Post by vadimberman »

> EDIT (March 2, 2018): It appears that there are multiple "GTX Corps", so I want to make it clear that the ones going after us don't have much of an online presence

IANAL, just was curious about the identity and did some amateur sleuthing. Results below...

The GTX Corp in Wikipedia seems like a real trading company but there is a couple of odd things about it. It's a public company made of 7 (seven) people; they have tracking products and 80 patents. Theoretically, it could be that they supplement the legit business with patent trolling. But yes, it's not very likely.

So I went to look up the patent info instead. If you google "US patent 7,177,838", you see that it's somewhat of a holy grail for the patent trolls. It was used to sue Amazon, Apple, Visa, News Corp, Starbucks, and the whole alphabet of multinationals. Many of these settled, as the lawyer of Playsaurus mentioned. The name of the suing entity was Actus, LLC (https://www.socialgameslaw.com/2010/06/actus-sues-for-virtua..., https://www.law360.com/articles/124471/apple-amazon-out-of-a..., https://www.law360.com/articles/165880/visa-m-t-bank-resolve...). They don't seem to have any presence online, although there is a website for Actus (http://www.actus.company) but even though it looks like a front for foreign intelligence operations, it does not seem to have anything in common with that Actus.

The patent public record is here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7177838B1/en?oq=7%2c177%.... It contains a history of assignments, giving a clue to what GTX actually is.

The first re-assignee was GTX Corporation (Arizona). The current one is GTX Corporation (California). Between that, it was PayByClick and Actus, which is when the mega-suits were filed. It seems improbable that the two GTX companies are completely different.

The search in the California register turned nothing meaningful (https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy...). It's either the entities are named somewhat differently or dissolved.

The search in Arizona, on the other hand, produced interesting results. This is the right GTX: http://ecorp.azcc.gov/Details/Corp?corpId=F00380025. Founded in 1987, business type: technology. Details below.

The patent was filed by Marvin Ling on Jan 26, 2000. Already in May it was reassigned to GTX. A family or an acquaintance? Let's see: the current CEO is Andrew Ling. From the foundation until 2008, however, the president was Marvin Ling, including the year 2000 when the patent was filed and reassigned. Andrew Ling appears to be a lawyer in Arizona; his LinkedIn profile confirms that he is the right person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlingattorney. And the website actually exists where it's supposed to be, just not liked by Google: http://www.gtx.com/about/press/aml_president_pr.asp.

The patent itself was reassigned to Pay By Click (sounds like an entity materially interested in the patent) in 2002, after which the annual report filing became irregular. In 2005, GTX received a notice with a threat of the license revocation; same happened in 2013 and 2014. It became better after that which coincided with the reassignment of the patent.

Summary. It looks like it's not a proxy set up by lawyers to sue. It appears to be an old family business which was dormant for a while and now wants to capitalise on an old patent that either someone else or a different structure used to shake down a few giants.

While the GTX is registered in Arizona where its owners live, it seems to be a Delaware corporation. I don't understand why they hired a law firm in Boston to threaten a company in California. The guy is a lawyer; does it mean he is not serious about the lawsuit? Does he expect you to haggle and offer, Russell Peters style, $34,500 as the last price?

Good luck.

Re: Patent trolls are shaking us down for selling “rubies” in our game

#159

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

scarmig wrote: post #14
jannotti wrote: post #2

Trying to find other companies under the same threat is a great approach. In a similar situation, this allowed my company to fight a patent troll and share costs, so we didn't cave under the, "It'll cost us this much in legal fees anyway" argument.

There should be some kind of patent troll clearinghouse. Companies can check it to see if other companies are reporting the same shakedown tactics for a given patent. Though, could a patent troll could get around that by spacing out the trolling? So by the time any company finds another company that's been trolled, they've already paid it up and don't have as much incentive to fight the patent troll after the fact. T…

Most importantly, there need to be penalties for patent trolling. If you try to enforce a patent even though you must know that there is prior art (e.g. because you've been provided clear evidence of it), you go to jail. Not "the bankrupt LLC is liable to pay some money it doesn't have", the actual people behind it, behind actual bars.

Of course, the tricky part is not preventing legitimate patent litigation, but if you word it carefully enough, it could make it risky enough for patent trolls to not be worth it. The tradeoffs change when it's not LLC money at risk but the participant's personal freedom, so even if only 10% of patent trolls could be actually convicted, it might be enough to discourage the rest.

Or, of course, just dump software patents alltogether...

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