Posts from 2008
December 29, 2008
The Demise of the Word Balloon Patent
or How IMVU, Bruce Damer and I Saved Blizzard a Million Dollars and They Don’t Even Know It
Patent Trolls Piss Me Off
The latest news about Worlds.com, Inc. joining a long line of virtual world patent trolls has pissed me off.
You can always tell a patent troll because they are not actively developing or marketing the supposed “protected” technology and the patents are a decade old and they had previously turned a blind-eye to possible infringing use, then sold them to lawyers (or just retained a trolling firm) to generate cash to keep a portion of their anemic business on life-support by shaking down the gaming and virtual world industry. In the U.S. the big money target is Blizzard’s and their global monster hit: World of Warcraft. These lawyers don’t go after Blizzard straight away. That’d be stupid, since that company has the deep enough pockets to tell them to pound sand, and on the chance they might even become inspired take active countermeasures [as happened with the case I am going to share with you today]. Instead, they’ll first go after a few little guys who can’t really defend themselves; get them to roll over and pay just to establish a precedent. Then, armed with the claim that the industry has obviously accepted the validity of their patent – start the proceedings against the larger worlds, and eventually hit up the big guys – Linden Lab/Second Life and Blizzard/World of Warcraft.
I know about this particular pattern first hand, as Bruce Damer and I helped IMVU ‘s founder Will Harvey (et al.) defend against one of these terrible patent suits, and all the parties involved ended up limping away with limited victories.
Software Patents are Newer than Virtual Worlds
For the last several years, I’ve been doing a lot of patent consulting since I was one of the principle developers of Lucasfilm’s Habitat /QLink’s Club Caribe (the first graphical virtual world), which existed in the mid-1980s, before people even thought they could make money patenting software. This means that the stuff invented for Habitat is NOT PATENTED and is PRIOR ART to be used to defend against many early and bogus virtual world-related patents. Seriously folks, there are patents out there with claims like generating a random number on a server that is authoritative for chance events when received by clients. Really? “You can’t trust the client” was novel as late as 1996? I don’t think so! And I have the software, documentation, and widely cited white papers to prove it.
The Word Balloon Lawsuit
Three years ago, on November 3rd, 2005 Forterra Systems, the company formerly known as There.com, filed suit against Avatar Factory and William “Will” D. Harvey in US District court for Patent Infringement. The suit was all about US patent number 6,784,901 Method, system and computer program product for the delivery of a chat message in a 3D multi-user environment
Abstract
A chat system, method and computer program product for delivering a message between a sender and a recipient in a three-dimensional (3D) multi-user environment, wherein the 3D multi-user environment maintains respective digital representations of the sender and the recipient, uses a recipient interface to receive a message, map the message to a texture to generate a textured message, and render the textured message in the 3D multi-user environment so as to permit the recipient to visually ascertain the location of the digital representation of the sender in the 3D world. Received messages are mantained as two-dimensional elements on a recipient viewport.
- Inventors: Harvey; William D. (Palo Alto, CA), McHugh; Jason G. (East Palo Alto, CA); Paiz; Fernando J. (Millbrae, CA), Ventrella; Jeffrey J. (San Francisco, CA)
- Assignee: There (Menlo Park, CA)
- Filed: August 31, 2000
- Granted: August 31, 2004
You can find all the details about this case online by entering the case number 95000155 here – there are thousands of pages of documents. I am not a lawyer, I’m a storyteller, and was just one of many people who played a non-trivial role in determining the primary outcome.
I like to call this action the Word Balloon Lawsuit since the claims in question are primarily about displaying chat messages in word balloons that float over an avatar’s head in a virtual world. Forterra was claiming they had a patent on them and IMVU was infringing and should stop or pay up.
You probably noticed in the patent office excerpt above that the primary inventor on the Patent is the same name as the primary individual defendant – Will Harvey. Will filed the patent while he was still a founder and member of the virtual world and company There (which was later renamed Forterra Systems). After leaving There, Will founded IMVU – another 3D avatar chat system – dropping the virtual world from the original idea altogether and just keeping the best lessons about avatars and user-created clothing, objects, and environments.
The Word Balloon Suit against IMVU seemed shrewd on Forterra’s part for several reasons:
- IMVU, on the surface, had features that looked in many ways similar to those in There.
- IMVU was small and not cash-rich and unlikely to put up a protracted fight, or any fight at all.
- By being an Inventor on the patent in question, Will’s options to defend himself would be limited because of the legal principle of Estoppel. For example, he couldn’t claim that the patent was invalid, since he signed the application saying that it was valid when it was filed.
Archivists To the Rescue!
January 9th, 2006 I received an email from Will that started:
“Thought you might be able to help me on something and simultaneously help stop some bad people from blatantly abusing the patent system by egregiously
asserting intellectual property rights that they don’t own.”
He was looking for support in the form of screen shots, articles, and even physical media that proved prior art to break the patent. He continued:
“… of course I know that we at There.com did not invent the idea of chat balloons, but There.com is trying to give the patent a broader interpretation than was intended and claim that they own idea of chat balloons […] something they didn’t even invent!”
He also contacted virtual worlds pioneer, author and archivist Bruce Damer. I was probably the most vocal co-creator of the first two or three generations of graphical virtual worlds and Bruce had a broad, almost ecumenical view of the entire field. Bruce’s book Avatars, is a catalog of the state of virtual worlds as of 1997 and would also play a key role in the final decision.
After reviewing the patent, it was obvious to me that Will’s interpretation was right – the patent was not meant to cover all 3D word balloons, it was something he called “Chat Wads” – to me a ho-hum idea of little indicators that the user is typing flying through the virtual world to the balloon. That interpretation might be innovative, but certainly no one had copied it. Stretching it to cover all word balloons? No way!
IMVU was based in Palo Alto, where I live, so Will and I had a face to face chat at a coffee shop downtown. He seemed understandably preoccupied with the personal ramifications. I said something like “Dude! I’m not just doing this for you – they aren’t just after you! If you cave or lose, they’re going after bigger fish. You aren’t the real target. They’re after Blizzard! They figure you’re easy pick’ns given that you have to defend yourself with one-hand tied behind your back and a limited legal budget.”
Bruce and I independently agreed to help with Will’s defense of this case not only for him or IMVU, but for virtual righteousness.
Bruce and I produced piles of prior art – for products such as Lucasfilm’s Habitat (1986), Club Caribe (1988), Fujitsu Habitat (1990), Sony’s Community Place (1995), WorldsAway (1996), The Palace (1996), ECHabitats/Microcosm (1997), and more. We provided screen shots, videos, white papers, published articles, and other patents. I even remember demonstrating ECHabitat’s 3D word balloon system to Will Harvey at Bruce Damer’s Avatars97 conference. I was even able to point to online conference photos that included myself and clearly EC Habitat with visible balloons.
The best defense is…
On July 17th, 2006 – IMVU requested a Patent Reexamination for the patent claims in question. If the request was granted this would allow the USPTO to review the patent more closely and potentially throw out invalid claims. This was a risky move, because if the PTO refused to reexamine, or even worse, reviewed and upheld the patent, it would be a disaster for IMVU. But, at this point the examiner’s research would now include all of the court record to date, including the comprehensive submissions of prior art that Bruce and I provided.
The Decision
On October 17th, 2007, after almost two years and 137 separate legal filings the lawsuit was Dismissed With Prejudice.
Bruce Damer wrote me:
I was told that the presiding federal judge [The Honorable Patricia V. Trumbull] upon denying all the claims of Forterra held up a copy of my 1997 book “Avatars” and said something like “not only are all of your claims predated by the prior art but that prior art is all contained in this one book which was published two years before the patent was filed…”. I like to think that she then slammed the book down on the bench, gavel-like, but wasn’t there to witness this.
The lawsuit was dead, but the patent reexamination was still underway.
The Danger of Suing with Bad Patents: Reexamination
Losing the suit wasn’t the end of the bad results for Forterra.
Almost one year later, on October 7th, 2008 the US Patent Office issued a Reexamination Certificate, numbered 95/000,155 that invalidates all of the claims in question – gutting the patent for use in future lawsuits against 3D chat systems.
Virtual worlds with chat balloons past, present, and future could rest a little easier, even if they didn’t know it. Blizzard dodged a bullet. You’re welcome guys. :-)
Epilog: Goliath’s Rage
Forterra was beaten, twice.
In a Hollywood-inspired universe, this would be the end of the story: Rationality and the little guy triumph, the free (virtual) world is saved, and the big bully goes home with his proverbial tail between his legs, right?
But this is the real world of angry losers.
Will Harvey had really pissed off someone with a lot of money. Forterra filed a new and unrelated lawsuit that seems to me to be attempting to make IMVU pay for the lost potential revenue as a result of defeating the chat-balloon patent suit. Unlike with British tort law, where losers pay much of the winner’s legal costs, in the US civil courts it often ends up that the one with the most cash can continue to sue the little guy over and over, making him spend dollar-for-dollar the same amount of money with no real recourse. Deepest pockets can force a financial draw.
This later suit was eventually settled for undisclosed terms to presumably just get the whole matter behind them. As a side effect of the settlement, if it weren’t for this post, you probably would have never heard about any of this. But, you see, I never signed anything. :-) And the patent (re)examiner pulled the entire court proceedings into the web-accessible public record!
So that’s a free tip for you: Civil court documents become a part of the USPTO’s Patent Reexamination process. Amazing what you can find on the web these days.
But, Word Balloons are Free!
So, IMVU and Will Harvey took one on the chin for the rest of us. I say Huzzah! to them! They did us all a big favor.
Too many companies just cave when stuff like this comes along. It takes real courage to stand up and say “Hey! That’s not right!” Especially to Patent Trolls. So, if you see Will at a conference somewhere, say “Thanks Man!” He can’t talk about any of it, but hopefully with this blog post and the story spreading through the social network, maybe he doesn’t have to.
Patents weren’t created so that people can sue each other into the ground, they were created specifically to allow an individual (and eventually a company) to have a limited exclusive period to develop and market their invention. They are meant for defense. Something has gone horribly wrong that people who aren’t developing or marketing an invention at all are just applying scatter-shot legal action on the hopes of a big payoff. This sets the wrong kind of incentives for the creation of patents – see or think of a clever idea – patent it quick, without actually understanding if it is novel or common or has prior art. Or, if you patent something you think is novel, wait years as others use a similar idea to build successful products and then spring from the trees shouting “Ah ha! I got you! We’ll just sort it all out in court.” After all, if you can patent a method of swinging on a (tree) swing, you can patent anything!
Disclosure
I do not categorically object to patents. I have several granted patents and about the same number pending approval – filing defensive patents is unfortunately required by the current business environment . There are two Fujitsu patents that are in my name that Chip and I refused to sign because of prior art, and I have copies the legal paper trail to prove it – so if Fujitsu shows up at your door claiming to have the patent on the virtual world, you know where to find us.
December 28, 2008
Interview about building Lucasfilm’s Habitat (LONG!)
Chip and Randy Talk About The Development of Habitat for QLink from Jeri Ellsworth on Vimeo
CircuitGirl/Jeri Ellsworth posted a video interview with Chip and me back in November about the making of Lucasfilm’s Habitat/Club Caribe for the QLink service during the mid-late 1980s.
Warning:– it’s and hour long, and the audio goes a little wonky a bit through. Oh yeah, and I mispeak about my first project with Lucasfilm Games – it was Koronis Rift, not Rescue on Fractalus – I was running on 5 hours sleep over two days at the time…
December 18, 2008
Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems
I’d like to to announce that I, Randy, am co-authoring a book with Bryce Glass for Yahoo!Press/O’Reilly entitled: Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems.
We’re starting a blog and wiki to document and share the process as well as the content. The blog is available at http://buildingreputation.com and the wiki will be up in the new year. We expect to post quite often as we pound out the chapters of our book, so be sure to get yer RSS feed ASAP.
December 2, 2008
Mud/Moo/Virtual World Pioneers Panel
Raph Koster, a first class pioneer himself, posted a set of pictures of Richard Bartle, Pavel Curtis, Brian Green, himself, and myself taken just before the pioneer’s panel at Living Games Worlds. First time we were all in one place. I knew them all, but Bartle and Curtis had never met!
We all missed having the real brains behind Lucasfilm’s Habitat there: Chip Morningstar. Hope you’re feeling well buddy, and I hope you like how I covered our spot. :-)
November 12, 2008
Lileks on Toontown
The invaluable James Lileks weighs in on Toontown.
November 1, 2008
Blog recovered, mostly
With the help of various undiscarded bric-a-brac laying about the house and a big boost from the Internet Archive (yay Brewster!), I have recovered nearly all of the content of Habitat Chronicles and restored the blog to something resembling its former glory. I was able to restore 100% of the posts and about 95% of the comments.
All the content should be here, though we still need to put in a bunch of redirects so that links to the old pages will lead to the proper new ones (in particular, a version change in MovableType causes the URLs for archived posts to now have a different format; the new format is arguably better but will break old links).
We’re also planning on moving from our current interim host (Yahoo!) to a more reliable and permanent hosting service. If any of you have opinions about what web hosting companies you like, please let us know, either by leaving a comment or emailing me.
And if anybody notices any links that are broken because they point to the old site, we’d appreciate hearing about that too. (I already know that the HabitatRedux.ppt document is not there, because Yahoo!’s file uploader won’t allow me to upload a file that large.)
October 20, 2008
Chip and Randy @ Living Game Worlds IV 12/1-12/2
Registration is now open for
Living Game Worlds IV – Interplay: Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds
December 1-2, 2008
Georgia Tech
Technology Square Research Building
85 5th Street, Atlanta, GA
Step in to the vanguard of digital gaming at Georgia Tech’s 4th annual Living Game Worlds symposium to be held December 1-2, 2008. Raph Koster and Chris Klaus headline this year’s conference which will showcase “InterPlay,” networked online play and the rapidly-growing domains of multiplayer games and virtual worlds. The symposium will also feature a pioneers panel including luminaries Richard Bartle, Brian Green, Chip Morningstar, Randy Farmer and Pavel Curtis. Also, don’t miss the chance to see the latest demos from Georgia Tech’s Digital Media Program, EGL, and GVU. Early registration ends October 31. Register now at http://gameworlds.gatech.edu
Media Inquiries: gameworlds-media@lists.gatech.edu
All other Inquiries: gameworlds@lists.gatech.edu
[Please Circulate]
October 17, 2008
The Tripartite Identity Pattern
One of the most misunderstood patterns in social media design is that of user identity management. Product designers often confuse the many different roles required by various user identifiers. This confusion is compounded by using older online services, such as Yahoo!, eBay and America Online, as canonical references. The services established their identity models based on engineering-centric requirements long before we had a more subtle understanding of user requirements for social media. By conjoining the requirements of engineering (establishing sessions, retrieving database records, etc.) with the users requirements of recognizability and self-expression, many older identity models actually discourage user participation. For example: Yahoo! found that users consistently listed that the fear of spammers farming their e-mail address was the number one reason they gave for abandoning the creation of user created content, such as restaurant reviews and message board postings. This ultimately led to a very expensive and radical re-engineering of the Yahoo identity model which has been underway since 2006.
Consistently I’ve found that a tripartite identity model best fits most online services and should be forward compatible with current identity sharing methods and future proposals.
The three components of user identity are: the account identifier, the login identifier, and the public identifier.
Account Identifier (DB Key)
From an engineering point of view, there is always one database key – one-way to access a user’s record – one-way to refer to them in cookies and potentially in URLs. In a real sense he account identifier is the closest thing the company has to a user. It is required to be unique and permanent. Typically this is represented by a very large random number and is not under the user’s control in any way. In fact, from the user’s point of view this identifier should be invisible or at the very least inert; there should be no inherent public capabilities associated with this identifier. For example it should not be an e-mail address, accepted as a login name, displayed as a public name, or an instant messenger address.
Login Identifier(s) (Session Authentication)
Login identifiers are necessary create valid sessions associated with an account identifier. They are the user’s method of granting access to his privileged information on the service. Historically, these are represented by unique and validated name/password pairs. Note that the service need not generate its own unique namespace for login identifiers but may adopt identifiers from other providers. For example, many services except external e-mail addresses as login identifiers usually after verifying that the user is in control of that address. Increasingly, more sophisticated capability-based identities are accepted from services such as OpenID, oAuth, and Facebook Connect; these provide login credentials without constantly asking a user for their name and password.
By separating the login identifier from the account identifier, it is much easier to allow the user to customize their login as the situation changes. Since the account identifier need never change, data migration issues are mitigated. Likewise, separating the login identifier from public identifiers protects the user from those who would crack their accounts. Lastly, a service could provide the opportunity to attach multiple different login identifiers to a single account — thus allowing the service to aggregate information gathered from multiple identity suppliers.
Public identifier(s) (Social Identity)
Unlike the service-required account and login identifiers, the public identifier represents how the user wishes to be perceived by other users on the service. Think of it like clothing or the familar name people know you by. By definition, it does not possess the technical requirement to be 100% unique. There are many John Smiths of the world, thousands of them on Amazon.com, hundreds of them write reviews and everything seems to work out fine.
Online a user’s public identifier is usually a compound object: a photo, a nickname, and perhaps age, gender, and location. It provides sufficient information for any viewer to quickly interpret personal context. Public identifiers are usually linked to a detailed user profile, where further identity differentiation is available; ‘Is this the same John Smith from New York that also wrote the review of the great Gatsby that I like so much?’ ‘Is this the Mary Jones I went to college with?’
A sufficiently diverse service, such as Yahoo!, may wish to offer multiple public identifiers when a specific context requires it. For example, when playing wild-west poker a user may wish to present the public identity of a rough-and-tumble outlaw, or a saloon girl without having that imagery associated with their movie reviews.
Update 11/12/2008: This model was presented yesterday at the Internet Identity Workshop as an answer to many of the confusion surrounding making the distributed identity experience easier for users. The key insight this model provides is that no publicly shared identifier is required (or even desirable) to be used for session authentication, in fact requiring the user to enter one on a RP website is an unnecessary security risk.
Three main critiques of the model were raised that should be addressed in a wider forum:
- There was some confusion of the scope of the model – Are the Account IDs global?
I hand modified the diagram to add an encompassing circle to show the context is local – a single context/site/RP. In a few days I’ll modify the image in this post to reflect the change.
- The term “Public Identity” is already in use by iCards to mean something incompatible with this model.
I am more than open to an alternative term that captures this concept. Leave comments or contact me at randy dot farmer at pobox dot com.
- Publically sharable capability-based identifiers are not included in this model. These include email addresses, easy-to-read-URLs, cel phone numbers etc.
There was much controversy on this point. To me, these capability based identifiers are outside the scope of the model, and generating them and policies sharing them are withing the scope of the context/site/RP. Perhaps an interested party might adopt the tripartite pattern as a sub-pattern of a bigger sea of identifiers. My goal was not to be all encompassing, but to demonstrate that only three identifiers are required for sites that have user generated content, and that no public capability bound ID exchange was required. RPs should only see a the Public ID and some unique key for the session that grants permission bound access to the user’s Account.
October 14, 2008
Context is King: Lessons from Online Communities
Here’s the SlideShare from the talk I’m giving tonight at BayChi. This is the first time I’m presenting this information to the general public. If you can make it, I can only say that the notes I uploaded with the deck are complete, but are really only a guideline to what I might say live – every presentation is different.
If you’ve come here after the presentation, please feel free to comment on this post as an alternate feedback channel.
When the video is available, I’ll update this post with the pointer and share the presentation more widely.
September 25, 2008
Context is King talk@ Baychi October 14th
I’ll be giving my talk “Context is King” at BayCHI on October 14th. Kevin Cheng will also be presenting: “See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas”.
Context is King
For more than three decades, people have been mediating communications with each other using computer networks.
Strangely, detailed best practices about how to facilitate online collaboration, communication, and community (aka Social Computing) are not yet in broad practice. Randy Farmer is working on a book that he hopes will remedy that situation by providing detailed patterns and anti-patterns for building online communities in context.
This talk contains many of the core inspirations for that work. He will outline common contexts and describe typical pitfalls encountered by product design and community operations staff when creating and operating social media-laden sites.
This is the first time I’ll be giving this talk to the general public. Of course, this means I’ll have to finally publish it on SlideShare (and blog that here). Any tips for converting would be greatly appreciated.