Saturday, December 13, 2008

Patent Troll Claims To Have Invented Virtual Worlds

Are virtual worlds under legal threat? Lawyer Sean Kane notes that http://www.worlds.com/ is now claiming to have invented the idea for a "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space" back in 1995, and has hired legal heavyweights to defend its claim to intellectual property. Could this be a problem for Second Life, and hundreds of virtual worlds?

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

From Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moove

Moove is a privately held company based in Köln, Germany, with a branch in Los Angeles. The company is owned by Lothar Bongartz and Dr. A. Burak Kozan, a pair of professional software developers. Before establishing moove, they had already developed products such as Nantucket Clipper Tools, CA-Visual Objects, and DC-Tools, development tools in the fields of object-oriented programming, databases and general function libraries. The company was founded in 1994.

"Moove" is the creator of the Virtual world moove online, which is accessible using the proprietary 3d client Roomancer, available in both English and German.

Hopefully this shows that "chat systems" and virtual worlds existed prior to worlds.com