The latest target for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Patent Busting Project comes courtesy of Patent 6,264,560, a patent for a "method and system for playing games on a network." The patent in question is held by Sheldon F. Goldberg and was granted on July 24, 2001, about two years after it was filed. Like many of the patents we cover on Ars, this one make some very broad claims.
Goldberg's patent claims to cover any and all online, multiplayer games that offer real-time updates of player rankings and use tournament-style play. Patent '560 also covers serving up targeted advertising using player demographics.
The EFF accuses Goldberg of extracting hefty licensing fees from online gaming companies anxious to avoid what could be costly litigation, a scenario that has become all too familiar.
According to the EFF, there's a significant amount of prior art on the '560 patent, the existence of which should lead the US Patent and Trademark Office to overturn it upon reexamination. In particular, Netrek, an online multiplayer game with origins in the mid 1980s, makes use of much of the same technology described in Goldberg's patent. Much of the code for Netrek is open source, and its development is archived online; the source code was first posted to Usenet in late 1989.
