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.
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.
Wow. I actually remember playing your game when I was 17. I can't remember details about the virtual currency though.
The '838 patent was filed in 2000 (which is the effective date, 2007 is just the processing date). Did Achaea have virtual currency before then? If so, that would help us a lot.
Their patent is for digital tokens ... Clearly rubies are your "unit of currency". Is there any chance it was supposed to be Rubles but was misspelled?
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 prior art. I've never had to testify about it in court, so I'm fairly sure that each time the trolls dropped it before going to court.
As to how much it costs - no idea. They had pricey lawyers though, so there's certainly some cost involved. I suppose it depends on how big the balls on the troll are, or perhaps how easily they think the defendant will be intimidated into just settling.
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The following is not legal advice and should not be construed as such. Short answer is that it really depends on your strategy and the rate of your firm. For example, a colleague of mine works at a top tier firm. They were hired to defend a major auto maker against a troll. They took the case to trial, won and then successfully countersued for repayment of fees. The whole thing took a couple years (patent cases move at a glacial pace), and the lawyers ended up billing the car company for several million dollars. I also don’t know that they were ever able to successfully collect on the countersuit judgement.
Another strategy is to try and invalidate the patent via the USPTO before it goes to trial. This often does work with bogus patents, but it’s still not cheap. I have heard the ballpark figure is $100k.
Play by mail games have you beat by decades. Which is the usual problem with patent claims (good!) and claiming credit for inventing an idea (endless arguments :-))
Have you ever considered taking action against the lawyers representing the trolls? Most likely they are working on a contingency basis and will keep 1/3 of whatever the trolls can extract from you. It's likely that their friends, family and the people in their community have no idea they engage in these activities. I have heard of defendants using PR campaigns effectively in these cases. Oftentimes a potential $10k payout is not worth your friends and neighbors finding out how you really make your money.
I already named them and dumped the documents, and stated facts. I worry that doing anything to proactively impact their lives in a bad way could be used against us in a trial, because they could highlight it to paint a pretty bad picture, making us look really bad in front of a jury. We haven't done anything like that yet.
It doesn't matter that they started it or that we are in the right. If you ruin someone's life, it looks bad even if you had a good reason to do it.
They're the ones ruining our lives right now. I think a court will also see it this way. I think that helps us get them to walk away.
If you already don't have much money for legal fees, making things personal with an unscrupulous lawyer who doesn't mind filing petty lawsuits seems like a dangerous idea.
Please don't take any of my comments as legal advice but I have been through this nonsense before. The unfortunate thing about these lawsuits is that if you try to fight/defend them through traditional means, you almost always end up spending more than what you would have spent in an early negotiated settlement (especially when your time and stress are factored in). Unless the defendant has a lawyer friend willing to work at a discounted rate, $35k will not get him very far at all, especially if this goes to trial.
Who is this expert hired by GTX? He appears to be a startup guy himself so it's surprising he would get involved in this. It might be worth reaching out to him to confirm 1) that his signed statement is legitimate and 2) try to reason with him.
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:
Ultima Online launched in 1997, but development goes back way before that. A core part of the game economy was gold that could be used for trade between players, as well as NPCs (non-player characters).
Look up Diku MUD family. I used to hack on a population CircleMUD derivative many many years ago. We had virtual currency...people regularly bought and traded items for gold.
Holy shit it's Wolfey. It's me, Patrick from Meteor Games.
Lemme go through my rolodex of lawyers and see who owes me a favor. In the meantime, look into legal insurance. You mind find an affordable solution to drive these cunt fucks into the earth for cheap.
