A company called Walker Digital has filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard and social-games developer Zynga, alleging that the two companies have infringed on a patent that they hold. Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Mafia Wars and several other products have been named which apparently infringe on Walker Digital’s U.S. Patent Number 6425825.
The patent that Walker Digital holds, which was granted in 2002, covers a “method and a system for a distributed tournament system in which many remotely located players participate in a tournament through input/output devices connected to a central controller which manages the tournament”. Player identification, payment of tournament entry fees and accessing a database that stores player information are other aspects that the patent covers. This description sounds an awful lot like a dedicated server meets an Excel spreadsheet to the folks here at PCF.
Walker Digital appears to base their business around holding patents which they then sell for profit to companies that can make use of them. According to their website they presently hold more than 200 US patents. They are currently engaged in another lawsuit with Facebook for infringing a patent involving the sharing of user information.
Brett Venter
