Lodsys is one of those companies that exist solely to claim rights to ideas and then make money off of companies that actually do things by selling patents or suing over infringements. Now it has the videogame industry in its sights, as it aims to tackle eleven companies at once.
Electronic Arts, Square Enix, Take-Two and even Rovio have been roped into the fight, with Lodsys accusing them all of infractions. Various other mobile developers are all embroiled in separate battles with company, and in the past six months alone, Lodsys has taken Best Buy, Canon Sam's Club, Samsung, Best Western, CVS, and Adidas to court.
Amazingly, it is believed that the people who work at Lodsys are able to look in the mirror and not see a throbbing, drooling leech staring right back at them.
Lodsys's giant lawsuit now includes Angry Birds [TG Daily]
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Contest:
2:15 PM on 07.22.2011 | 
I'm sure there are dozens of other things which COULD improve gaming as a whole, but they can't be implemented because of patents.
video game companies should be just as accountable as any any company in any other industry.
I'm serious; it has one empoyee, it's CEO, and while the company "operates" in East Texas (for reasons that should become obvious), the guy lives in Illinois.
Yep.
Honestly... I have no idea why this specific court is such a haven for patent lawsuits. Who's paying off who exactly? Why hasn't this court been investigated for shenanigans? If there was a large number of specific kinds of lawsuits coming to one court in particular, you can't help but thing something's up.
Thanks, Texas! As if I needed another reason to *facepalm* whenever I hear something about my oh-so-lovely home state...
God speed.
It may be the law but if you don't have intent to make it after a year or so I don't think it should hold up. Especially when there are people or companies like this one that make patents for ideas that could happen with the intent of making money by lawsuits later on. Most of the time they're pretty vague on the ideas as well so they can fit it as need be
I already came up with Coke & Lime and the soluble dishwashing tablet wrapper before they were invented.
What the hell is wrong with me today.
Right now, I'm not even sure how on earth they managed to file that patent (if it does exist), I see no novelty in it.
Tim Langdell probably made money for a couple of decades claiming that he owned the word "Edge" in regards to videogames. He's even credited for the reason Soul Edge was changed to Soul Blade.
And the main reason he went down when EA challenged him in court wasn't because the law was against him in theory. It was because all his "evidence" was fictional. Things like invoices for sales that didn't exist, baldfaced lies, and disc evidence that he fabricated for the case (but messed up on one of the details, resulting in a disc created under Win95 that supposedly was made years before Win95 was released). I think it was Rock Paper Shotgun that had a good break down of the court case.
If Langdell had real evidence to his claims, the law would probably have been on his side.
And it isn't just Langdell and Lodys that do stuff like this. Sony, Atari, and others do it as well. It doesn't make news because the companies tend to cut deals, either with payoffs or trading access or the like. When money was needed, Nintendo and others were threatened with suit over a whole set of Atari patents, for example. And it seems every time a new controller comes out, some obscure company is waiting in the wings with a patent for something involved in the process.
As for what does get patented (or trademarked), well, there are a lot of tech-related patents awarded that probably never should have been. Some of them are pretty insane. The patent system wasn't designed with the speed of modern tech development in mind, the people awarding patents don't have the knowledge required, and the system relies on the fallback of "It can be challenged in court" to cover its mistakes (which tends to be too risky to actually work properly).
I just thought of two more.