treehouse-avatar-technologies
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Turbine settles Treehouse Avatar Technologies lawsuit via partnership
No matter how long you've been playing Lord of the Rings Online or Dungeons & Dragons Online, it's unlikely that you've heard of Treehouse Avatar Technologies before the company started throwing lawsuits around like party favors. After a little over a year, Turbine has ended the pending lawsuit by agreeing to license the firm's technologies for the aforementioned games, despite the fact that both games appear to have been developed before Treehouse Avatar Technologies filed its patent. The Turbine lawsuit predates a number of threatening letters sent by Treehouse Avatar to various small indie developers that made similar overtures. No mention is made of how much Turbine is paying to license the technology for the games in question, which were the only two cited by the suit.
Patent troll strikes small indie MMO devs
Late last year, Treehouse Avatar Technologies filed a still-pending lawsuit against Turbine for copyright infringement claims surrounding the use of "character-enabled" and "character-attribute data linked with one or more character data." Well, they're back and claiming patent infringement on three more studios. This time, though, the studios are all small indie developers including Starpires developer Bad Pug Games, Minions of Mirth developer Prairie Games, Aces High developer HiTech Creations, and A Tale in the Desert developer eGenesis. The patent infringement claim centers on U.S Patent 8,180,858: "Methods for Presenting Data Over a Network Based Network User Choices and Collecting Real-time Data Related to Said Choices," which is the same patent infringement claimed against Turbine. Each letter looks to have been sent out on or around July 1st of this year. No word yet on any legal developments beyond these letters. [Thanks for the tip, Avaloner81!]
Lawsuit claims patent infringement by Turbine
Ever heard of Treehouse Avatar Technologies? Yeah, neither have we, but a lawsuit filed this week is aiming to get the Canadian-based web services company a little publicity. After being awarded a patent for the "Method And System For Presenting Data Over A Network Based On Network User Choices And Collecting Real-Time Data Related To Said Choices" on May 15th of this year, Treehouse is going after Turbine for what they consider infringement with both Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. The lawyer-speak in the suit itself is not for the faint of heart, but a few of the claims include the fact that LotRO and DDO are "character-enabled" and "have character-attribute data linked with one or more character data." We can't help but be reminded of the Worlds.com vs. NCsoft lawsuit filed a few years ago claiming an infringement on "scalable chat," but it seems a bit far-fetched that a patent suit can be won over games that came out several years before the patent was even issued. But hey, that's why we write about video games and don't swing a gavel around.
