News
Case Update: Lonestar v. Nintendo (E.D.Tex.)
Lonestar Inventions LP v. Nintendo of America Inc., case no. 6:07-cv-00261 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. This lawsuit between patent-holding company Lonestar Inventions LP and gaming…
News: Second Life CTO resigns
Sorry I’ve been radio silent for a while. Life has been busy, you know how it goes… In any event, it appears that Cory Ondrejka, employee No. 4 at San Francisco-based Linden…
News: Second Life IP theft lawsuit
More Second Life news: As reported in the New York Post, a half-dozen entrepreneurs are suing a Queens man, charging him with counterfeiting and selling versions of their products. Here’s the catch:…
News: Change in Second Life ownership policy???
As originally reported on Terra Nova, Linden Labs appears to have made a potentially significant change to the wording on its home page. The home page used to read:“Second Life is a…
News: Potential DMCA fair use relief on the way?
As reported on GamePolitics.com, Later today the ECA will announce its support for HR1201, known as the Fair Use Act of 2007. The proposed legislation will give consumers limited rights to circumvent…
Michigan Law School – First Impressions’ Symposium
Well it’s not strictly video game IP law, but it certainly applies to video games and explores, in view of KSR, how easy it may or may not be to obtain patent…
News: Microsoft spins off Bungie Studios
Well its old news by now, but in case you haven’t heard, Microsoft and Bungie announced on Friday that Bungie has split off from Microsoft, becoming an independent entity. Bungie will still…
News: new Donkey Kong world record
I have a client that I am helping to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. For what? Well that has to wait until the record is published, but suffice it…
News: man gets two years in jail for video game crime.
An Illinois man was sentenced to two years in prison for violating copyright law through the unauthorized sale of video games on his Web site, the U.S. Department of Justice announced late…
News: quoted in USA Today re Facebook lawsuit
Well its not a video game lawsuit, but interesting nonetheless. And, yes, this post could be considered shameless self-promotion. Nonetheless, I was recently quoted in USA Today in an article regarding the…
Is artistic style a new type of Video Game IP?
Courts have held that artists’ copyright protection can extend beyond their literal pictorial works, and some courts have even insinuated that an artist can receive copyright expression for their artistic style, e.g.,…
News: GNU GPL v. 3 released
Today the Free Software Foundation released version 3 of the GNU General Public License. The new version of the license contains a lengthy patent license provision, copied below, that users should be…
News: Feature on Entrepreneur.com
Ok, consider this post shameless self-promotion. Steve Chang and I were recently interviewed by a writer at Entrepreneur.com, and are showcased in an article about playing video games at work. Link to…
News: Virtual World Awards
Well it was really only a matter of time. When an industry gets large enough, we need awards to distinguish the good from the bad. MMOs and Virtual Worlds are the latest…
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…
PATENT (Application): Sony’s motion-sensing input device
As you may recall, Sony lost a lawsuit for millions of dollars to Immersion regarding Sony’s use of vibration technology in its PlayStation 2 controllers. Sony subsequently announced that the PlayStation 3…