Putting 'Game Pieces' Together Online To Win Something Patented; All The Big Social Gaming Companies Sued

from the this-got-a-patent? dept

Someone, who prefers to remain anonymous, sent over the news that a company named Everglades Interactive has sued basically all of the big "social gaming" providers for patent infringement. Among those sued are EA, Playdom, Disney (which just bought Playdom), Zynga, Playfish, Rockyou and Crowdstar. The patent in question? It's patent 6,656,050, for an "odds accelerator for promotional type sweepstakes, games, and contests." If you read the details, it seems like the pretty standard process of taking various sweepstakes involving matching pieces (bottle caps, peel off stickers, etc.) to get certain prizes but moving it online. Of course, once you move such a physical process online, you can do slightly different things since you're not limited by geography and physical distribution. But all that seems like it should be obvious. Not to the patent examiners of course, who judged it patent worthy.

So how do all these social gaming sites infringe?

... by, among other things, making, using, importing, offering for sale, and/or selling products and services that provide game pieces that are applied to a game board at a game site, make information available about the pieces needed to complete a winning combination, allow the player to share or trade the game pieces, and enable the players to easily and securely store game pieces....

Of course, you would think that since pretty much every social gaming system does this, that it would be clear that this was an obvious thing to do if you're building a social gaming system. But, tragically (and ridiculously), that's not how our patent system works.

Filed Under: patents, social gaming, sweepstakes
Companies: disney, ea, playdom, rockyou, zynga