IM Provider Sues Activision-Blizzard, Sony, NCSoft... News

Publishers of MMOs, and possibly any game featuring an online multiplayer component, could soon have to fork out for a patent owned by an instant messaging provider.

A report on The Boston Globe centres upon a lawsuit issued by Paltalk Holdings Inc., which alleges that Turbine Inc., Sony Corp., Activision-Blizzard Inc., NCSoft Corp., and Jagex Ltd. have infringed upon a patent owned by the New York based IM software and technology provider.

Paltalk acquired two patents (5,822,523 and 6,226,686) from MPath in 2001 that cover "methods for deploying interactive applications over hosted networks and group messaging servers".  Although the scope behind this description is wide ranging and certainly this lawsuit is far removed from Paltalk's primary business field, it's the fact that Microsoft settled out of court in a previous lawsuit that holds merit.

Paltalk sued Microsoft in 2006, alleging that the multiplayer features of the Halo 2 and Halo 3 infringed upon its patent.  Microsoft agreed to settle out of court after an initial hearing and paid Paltalk an undisclosed fee to license the patents.

At the time, Jason Katz, Founder and CEO of Paltalk claimed:

"After litigating with Microsoft for over two years to protect our intellectual property, it is gratifying to resolve this matter with Microsoft taking a license to Paltalk's patents."

By granting validity to Paltalk's patents presumably the publishers/developers mentioned in this lawsuit (along with, TVG suspects, many others) are presumably skating on very thin ice.