Patent Law

The following is excerpted from a General Patent Corporation press release that appeared today, January 9, 2009 at PR-inside:

General Patent Corporation (GPC), a leading patent licensing and enforcement firm, announced today that it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against NCSoft Corp. of Austin, TX on behalf of its client, Worlds.com, Inc. (Worlds).

The lawsuit (Case 6:08-cv-00508) was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division.

Worlds.com, Inc. (OTC BB: WDDD), of Brookline, MA, owns US Patent No. 7,181,690 titled "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space" (the "690 Patent). The Patent relates to computer architecture for a three-dimensional graphical multi-user interactive virtual world system. Such systems are utilized in Massive Multi-Player Online Games (MMORPG) of the type known as Graphical Multi-Dimension (GMUD) games, which provide a graphical representation of the player's character (avatar) wherein movement of the character in virtual space alters what the character views.

NCSoft Corp., a game developer with US offices in Austin, TX, is the purveyor of such games as City of Heroes, Guild Wars, Tabula Rasa, Lineage, and Lineage II, which have been identified in the complaint as infringing the Worlds' Patent.

Read the full press release here.