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

487 点作者 guildwriter大约 7 年前

25 条评论

Lasher大约 7 年前

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.

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jannotti大约 7 年前

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.

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zaroth大约 7 年前

This patent is absurd... selling credits was invented about a day after the concept of money itself. Accounting for those credits in a database was done by the fucking Egyptians. What the heck does this patent actually teach? It teaches absolutely nothing. It goes on for pages describing technology that already existed at the time and for decades prior to 2000. It’s a disgrace and an embarrassment.

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mysterypie大约 7 年前

In the PDF documents that Playsaurus has put online, the accuser's lawyers have redacted one line, and that's in the "The lawsuit they will file if we don't pay" document at the bottom, where it says:<pre><code> THE deBRUIN FIRM, LLC [Redacted] David W. deBruin (#4846) 1201 N. Orange Street, Suite 500 Wilmington, Delaware 19801 Telephone: (302) 660-2744 Facsimile: (302) 650-1574 ddebruin@thedebruinfirm.com Of Counsel: RUBIN AND RUDMAN LLP Leslie L. Jacobs, Jr. (pro hac vice forthcoming) 800 Connecticut Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20006 Telephone: (240) 356-1549 Facsimile: (202) 223-1849 ljacobs@rubinrudman.com gcoman@rubinrudman.com Attorney for Plaintiff GTX Corp. </code></pre> I was curious what was being redacted. Examining it with Acrobat Professional, I was able to discover that it says:<pre><code> /s/ David W. deBruin </code></pre> So it's just a signature.Btw, I'm pretty sure that the redaction was done by accusing lawyers and not by Playsaurus because the document author is "Leslie L. Jacobs", who is one of the accuser's lawyers.Though it's still not clear to me why the accuser has two sets of lawyers (THE deBRUIN FIRM and RUBIN AND RUDMAN). Anyone know what might be up with that?

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codingdave大约 7 年前

Letters can be ignored. Lawsuits must be responded to. And that same 35K will be offered as a deal after they file, if they file. They are trying to save THEIR legal costs, not yours. Let them sue. Fight it in court. Hopefully win. Counter-sue for your legal fees. Booyah.Note: IANAL, and any actual lawyer would be less flippant. But seriously... don't let attorneys bully you.

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sli大约 7 年前

Pretty obvious patent trolling if they're only going for this rather smalltime developer and none of the high profile F2P game developers and big time game developers releasing AAA games with a premium currency.

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oldcynic大约 7 年前

Hard to decide how I feel here. I hate software patents and patent trolls, but I also hate what f2p and premium currencies have done to gaming.Which is the lesser of these evils?

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chrismcb大约 7 年前

Doesn't this basically boil down to "Something on a COMPUTER" and thus should be invalidated by the Alice Corp decision? Not to mention the TON of prior art, even prior to the 2000 patent (what does the 2007 patent provide over the 2000 patent?) I'm positive you could purchase credits on BBSes that you could then use for ecommerce.I haven't read the entire patent, but I fail to see the difference between the 2000 filing, and the 2007 filing. So how does that work?

WalterBright大约 7 年前

Back in the 1970s, I played Monopoly on the PDP-10. The Monopoly money was "virtual".

shmerl大约 7 年前

> their behavior to be abusive and terribly unethical.Yep, it's called protection racket.

b1gtuna大约 7 年前

Of course these trolls have no face or names. Hope someone can track the actual owners down.

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vadimberman大约 7 年前

> 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 presenceIANAL, 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 (<a href="https://www.socialgameslaw.com/2010/06/actus-sues-for-virtual-currency-patent-infringement.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.socialgameslaw.com/2010/06/actus-sues-for-virtua...</a>, <a href="https://www.law360.com/articles/124471/apple-amazon-out-of-actus-patent-battle" rel="nofollow">https://www.law360.com/articles/124471/apple-amazon-out-of-a...</a>, <a href="https://www.law360.com/articles/165880/visa-m-t-bank-resolve-actus-e-payment-patent-spat" rel="nofollow">https://www.law360.com/articles/165880/visa-m-t-bank-resolve...</a>). They don't seem to have any presence online, although there is a website for Actus (<a href="http://www.actus.company" rel="nofollow">http://www.actus.company</a>) 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: <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US7177838B1/en?oq=7%2c177%2c838" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/patent/US7177838B1/en?oq=7%2c177%...</a>. 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 (<a href="https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchType=CORP&SearchCriteria=GTX&SearchSubType=Keyword" rel="nofollow">https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy...</a>). 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: <a href="http://ecorp.azcc.gov/Details/Corp?corpId=F00380025" rel="nofollow">http://ecorp.azcc.gov/Details/Corp?corpId=F00380025</a>. 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: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlingattorney" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlingattorney</a>. And the website actually exists where it's supposed to be, just not liked by Google: <a href="http://www.gtx.com/about/press/aml_president_pr.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.gtx.com/about/press/aml_president_pr.asp</a>.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.

45h34jh53k4j大约 7 年前

Id like to see worse. Let every patent be stripped from these predators. They also advertise: <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US7016536" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/patent/US7016536</a> which surely has plenty of prior art in image processing.

Oblouk大约 7 年前

I have a feeling the accuser simply googled "premium currency" and found the article posted by Playsaurus about abandoning F2P. They probably just took the top 10 results skimming for smaller companies that were F2P. I guess this is what you get for self publishing a game.

codecamper大约 7 年前

I hope this message reaches you over all the noise here.GTX Corp. may be a corporation whose securities are traded publicly.However, they ARE NOT legitimate.They are pure scum on another level beyond what they are doing to you.They have had their stock promoted. Pump & Dump.Have a look over these articles on Seeking Alpha for more.<a href="https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GTXO/analysis-and-news" rel="nofollow">https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GTXO/analysis-and-news</a>I'm not sure how I would go about handling these guys if they came after me for something. I don't think I would be so polite.

danschumann大约 7 年前

According to their flow, they collect user information after displaying a policy. My point is, if you re-arrange their flow chart, do you "invent around" the problem? (thereby negating their claim that you violate their patent(since their patent still relies on a specific process)?

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Ecco大约 7 年前

How is the price settled upon? I mean, why ask $35k specifically? Why not 3.5k or 350k?

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tabulatouch大约 7 年前

I think that a real statistic on previous trolls actions and settlement or litigation outcomes would greatly simplify the reasoning. Would the open data from thetrollingeffect website be of any use for building a model?

natch大约 7 年前

Unfortunately they may have more tricks up their sleeve. That is, once they get payment for one patent, effectively getting an implied acknowledgment of the merits of the (meritless imho) patent, they might then reveal their other related patents, and offer to license those for even more money.I wonder how many of these can be invalidated with trivial filings? These patents all have PayByClick Corporation as the assignee:7,676,432: Methods and apparatus for transacting electronic commerce using account hierarchy and locking of accounts<a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,676,432.PN.&OS=pn/7,676,432&RS=PN/7,676,432" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...</a>7,376,621: Method and apparatus for conducting electronic commerce transactions using electronic tokens<a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,376,621.PN.&OS=pn/7,376,621&RS=PN/7,376,621" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...</a>7,328,189: Method and apparatus for conducting electronic commerce transactions using electronic tokens<a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,328,189.PN.&OS=pn/7,328,189&RS=PN/7,328,189" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...</a>7,249,099: Method and apparatus for conducting electronic commerce transactions using electronic tokens<a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,249,099.PN.&OS=pn/7,249,099&RS=PN/7,249,099" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...</a>7,249,060: Systems and methods for distributing on-line content<a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,249,060.PN.&OS=pn/7,249,060&RS=PN/7,249,060" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...</a>7,177,838: Method and apparatus for conducting electronic commerce transactions using electronic tokens<a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,177,838.PN.&OS=pn/7,177,838&RS=PN/7,177,838" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...</a>6,876,979: Electronic commerce bridge system<a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=6,876,979.PN.&OS=pn/6,876,979&RS=PN/6,876,979" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...</a>

zerostar07大约 7 年前

Can american patent trolls equally easy bully companies outside the US?

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l3大约 7 年前

has someone tried patenting making money buy being a patent troll? that of course would make one mega patent troll to deal with.

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walrus01大约 7 年前

one example of prior art that has virtual currency in a multi-player game:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars</a>

devit大约 7 年前

Looks like software patents can actually benefit society in some cases.

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yohann305大约 7 年前

This might sound stupid but hear me out. Can you sell physical rubies that people can print on a paper or you could ‘ship’ them to the buyer? Meanwhile users can use their digital equivalent just like a gift card works. This would bypass the system.. brilliant isn’t it?!

chapill大约 7 年前

This is hating the player, not the game. The only way to win is not to play. Relocate to a country with no software patents. I hear Estonia is great. Do all your filing online. Be a remote working foreign contractor for your own company :P

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