News
News: Voice in Second Life
Linden Labs recently added voice capabilities to Second Life. Their beta test went public in March, and commentary has been, for the most part, positive. Voice is a natural extension for MMO…
News: Patent threat against Linux and open source games
(Fortune Magazine) — May 14, 2007: Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It’s often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will.…
News: 2002 IP case statistics
From the April 2007 ABA Journal, citing the U.S. Department of Justice special report: Of the 7,445 vicil intellectual property lawsuits filed in 2002: 140 (1.9%) made it through trial and received…
News: Joost in Beta
Looks like Joost is in Beta. If you haven’t heard of Joost, it’s a potential cable TV killer from the founders of Kazaa and Skype. Like Skype, this is legit on the…
News: Record sales of video games in 2006
Video-game sales a record $12.5B in ’06By BARBARA ORTUTAY, Associated Press, Business Writer, January 12, 2007 A strong December capped off a record year for the video game industry, with U.S. sales…
News: Buy a PS3… help save humanity?
There have been quite a few distributed computing projects over the years. Sony’s plan is perhaps the most ambitious yet. The PS3 has a Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) chip, the same used…
News: WikiPatents.com Community Patent Review
As you may recall, we took quite a bit of flack from the software developer community on Slashdot for our previous article published by Gamasutra. Some of the comments had to deal…
News: Star Fox is back for the Nintendo DS!!!
For those who remember the original Star Fox (as mentioned in our previous post regarding the Star Fox patent), Nintendo has announced Star Fox Command for Nintendo DS. Read the full story…
News: Fantasy Sports Under Attack AGAIN
Not even having time to revel in its recent victory in the C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing v. Major League Baseball Advanced Media lawsuit (No. 4:05-CV-00252 (E.D. Mo.)) regarding the use of player…
News: Sony appeals Immersion lawsuit
It appears the Sony/Immersion dispute is not over. As you may know, Immersion makes vibration technology for game controllers. The Northern District of California held that Sony infringed Immersion’s patents, and awarded…
News: New breed of games on the PhysX horizon
Mountain View, Calif.-based Ageia Technologies Inc., is the first to offer a specialized computer chip — called “PhysX” — designed to give video games a better sense of reality, as dictated by…
News: Author quoted on ABC news re Apple iTunes/iPod
WARNING: Shameless plug to follow! While not technically video game related, I have been quoted in an article on ABC News regarding the litigation/issue in Norway regarding Apple’s iTunes/iPod tie. While, as…
News: “Heidi Fleiss of Video Games” pleads guilty
A co-owner of a Hollywood video game store that caters to celebrity clients on Wednesday pleaded guilty to participating in a conspiracy to violate federal copyright laws by selling Xbox video game…
News: China upholds virtual property rights
China has upheld a guilty verdict and fine against a man who stole and sold players’ games IDs and online equipment amid growing calls for more concrete virtual property laws. Read more…
News: Second Life and “Electric Sheep”?
In a logical extension of the MMO genre, a young Company, Electric Sheep, is helping big customers create a presence inside “Second Life,” the popular virtual world in which people can do…
News: Hacked Xbox 360?
There have been rumors and various posts about a firmware hack for the Xbox 360, allowing people to play copied Xbox 360 games. A response from Microsoft has been posted on Gamerscoreblog,…
News: PS3 Launch Delay
Not exactly IP news, but interesting nonetheless. Looks like the launch of the PS3 is being delayed…
News: Red Cross enforces trademark against video game use
The Red Cross has begun to take it a little more seriously that game developers’ use of the Red Cross emblem has been rampant in years past. The Red Cross recently wrote…
News: Video Game market worth $10.5B in 2005
MarketWatch reports that the video game industry grew 6% in 2005, weighing in at $10.5 billion. That’s quite a sum of money, given that as reported by Fox, box office receipts for…
News: Criminal charges filed for Xbox modding. (Follow Up)
Following up on a previous post, two Hollywood video game store owners and a third man who were charged in December for allegedly pirating video games and installing them on modified Microsoft…