Armchair Diplomat

A rather amusing tale of litigation, care of Kotaku.  After having Sony settle out of court, Microsoft is the one remaining company still being sued over it’s online game interaction.  The suit is being pressed over a patent filed in 1994, here’s the details:

In 1991, Peter Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum came up with the idea of communicating live while playing the same video game in separate locations. They patented the technology for doing so in 1994. In 2002, Microsoft released Xbox Live, a gaming service that also allows users to communicate while playing the same game. Sony also released similar capabilities for PlayStation 2. In 2004, Hochstein, Tenenbaum and Harold Milton, Jr. (an assignee of the patent) brought a patent infringement suit against Microsoft and Sony alleging that the voice and data communications technology used in the gaming systems infringed on the patent claims.

Being Microsoft, they’ve dropped some fairly lulzy stunts on the case to tie it up (including dropping 140,000 “relevant” documents on Hochenstein and Tenenbaum, sans-index), but in the process have drawn a lot of heat from the court for their obvious stalling.  Apparently this may have cost them dearly, because it sounds as if the court is out of patience and may force a resolution soon.

Now while I’ll agree that MS and Sony should be paying up for any variety of patent infringement, it also seems like this is kind of a cash in measure on the part of the plaintiff.  It’s kind of akin to someone long ago pantenting the idea of reading books with coffee, then many years later suing a Borders store.

Actually, we’ve been looking for ways to finance the site recently.  And Borders HAVE been increasing their Australian stakehold.

Hmmmmmmmmm ……

You can read the whole article over at Patent Arcade.