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Paltalk sues Microsoft on patents for tens of millions
Those Redmond Rough Riders have been busy as of late, what with the launch of the Zune and all today. But while Allard and his gang are celebrating the launch of his latest brainchild, his old baby, Xbox Live, is getting sued for patent infringement in the wilds of East Texas. Paltalk, a video chat and community site, sued Microsoft on September 12th for infringing its 1998 patent on "Server-group messaging system for interactive applications" -- but really, doesn't that sound like every other program that talks to a server? The video chat company claims that Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming system stole the idea of in-game chats from Paltalk and wants "tens of millions of dollars" in damages. Now, again, when it comes to cases like this, we invoke the "WANL" (we are not lawyers) clause and postulate that the reason Paltalk isn't targeting a different company (such as Blizzard) is because Microsoft has a market cap of over a quarter trillion dollars, and Paltalk wants some of that pie. We remind the court of public opinion that Blizzard's mid-1990s titles like "Warcraft II" and "Starcraft" came out well before the Xbox and had game-based chat -- we know because a few of us spent many a'night typing things like: "4v4 No n00bs." [Via Ars Technica]
