Author Archive
December 5, 2009
The Cake is a Lie: Reputation, Facebook Apps, and “Consent” User Interfaces
This is a cross-post from Randy’s other blog Building Web Reputation Systems and all comments should be directed there.
In early November, I attended the 9th meeting of the Internet Identity Workshop. One of the working sessions I attended was on Social Consent user interface design. After the session, I had an insight that reputation might play a pivotal role in solving one of the key challenges presented. I shared my detailed, yet simple, idea with Kevin Marks and he encouraged me to share my thoughts through a blog post—so here goes…
The Problem: Consent Dialogs
The technical requirements for the dialog are pretty simple: applications have to ask users for permission to access their sensitive personal data in order to produce the desired output—whether that’s to create an invitation list, or to draw a pretty graph, or to create a personalized high-score table including your friends, or to simply sign and attach an optional profile photo to a blog comment.
The problem, however, is this—users often don’t understand what they are being asked to provide, or the risks posed by granting access. It’s not uncommon for a trivial quiz application to request access to virtually the same amount of data as much more “heavyweight”applications (like, say, an app to migrate your data between social networks.) Explaining this to users—in any reasonable level of detail—just before running the application causes them to (perhaps rightfully) get spooked and abandon the permission grant.
Conflicting Interests
The platform providers want to make sure that their users are making as informed a decision as possible, and that unscrupulous applications don’t take advantage of their users.
The application developers want to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible. This fact creates a lot of pressure to (over)simplify the consent flow. One designer quipped that it reduces the user decision to a dialog with only two buttons: “Go” and “Go Away” (and no other text.)
The working group made no real progress. Kevin proposed creating categories, but that didn’t get anywhere because it just moved the problem onto user education—”What permissions does QuizApp grant again?”
Reputation to the Rescue?
All consent dialogs of this stripe suffer from the same problem: Users are asked to make a trust decision about an application that, by definition, they know nothing about!
This is where identity meets trust, and that’s the kind of problem that reputation is perfect for. Applications should have reputations in the platform’s database. That reputation can be displayed as part of the information provided when granting consent.
Here’s one proposed model (others are possible, this is offered as an exemplar).
The Cake is a Lie: Your Friends as Canaries in the Coal Mine of New Apps
First a formalism: when an application wants to access a user’s private Information (I), they have a set of intended Purposes (P) they wish to use it for. Therefore, the consent could be phrased thusly:
“If you let me have your (I), I will give you (P). [Grant] [Deny]”
Example: “If you give me access to your friends list, I will give you cake.”
In this system, I propose that the applications be compelled to declare this formulation as part of the consent API call. (P) would be stored along with the app’s record in the platform database. So far, this is only slightly different from what we have now, and of course, the application could omit or distort the request.
This is where the reputation comes in. Whenever a user uninstalls an application, the user is asked to provide a reason, including abusive use of data and specifically asks a question to see if the promise of (P) was kept.
“Did this application give you the [cake] it promised?”
All negative feedback is kept—to be re-used later when other new users install the app and encounter the consent dialog. If they have friends who have uninstalled this application already complaining that “If (I) then (P)” string was false, then the moral equivalent of this would appear scrawled in the consent box:
“Randy says the [cake] was unsatisfactory.
Bryce says the [cake] was unsatisfactory.
Pamela says the application spammed her friends list.”
Afterthoughts
Lots of improvements are possible (not limiting it to friends, and letting early-adopters know that they are canaries in the coal mine.) These are left for future discussion.
Sure, this doesn’t help early adopters.
But application reputation quickly shuts down apps that do obviously evil stuff.
Most importantly, it provides some insight to users by which they can make more informed consent decisions.
(And if you don’t get the cake reference, you obviously haven’t been playing Portal.)
October 19, 2009
Dirty Word Filters Fail (again.)
Elder Game: MMO game development – The Tragic Story of The Cussing NPCs
Champions NPC trips the dirty word filter.
August 18, 2009
Do You Wanna Date My Avatar
Things sure have changed since the early days, when people debated if the term Avatar was too geeky…
August 12, 2009
Introducing Reputation Wednesdays at BuildingReputation.Com
Reputation Wednesday is an ongoing series of essays about reputation-related matters being posted over at buildingreputation.com which Randy co-authors. This week’s essay is entitled Ratings Bias Effects. This will likely be the only cross-posting, so be sure to subscribe! :-)
August 11, 2009
Entitlement: When User Empowerment Backfires #octribe
Scott Moore called for posts on the topic of Fostering culture in and around online communities I chose the suggested subtopic: Culture clashes between the community and the host organization.
This is my first #OCTribe post, and I’m running late, so please forgive the terseness. I may flesh this out a bit more over the coming days — randy
This post is directed at social media product designers and community moderation staff.
How much power do you give your users?
- Do you invest special powers in your users, perhaps to help you moderate your community?
- Do you have, or want to have, user advisory groups to help improve your product by providing feedback direct from the customer?
- Do you have appointed (or self appointed) long-term community leaders that are causing you problems but you’re petrified of how much damage they’ll do to your community and/or business?
If the answer to one or more of the above is yes, you’ve been headed in the right direction. But, you need to be introduced to the community moderation thoughts around the term Entitlement.
Matt Warburton has been a senior community manager for eBay, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn and has been recently sharing many of the the lessons he learned with other social media developers and media managers. One of his recent presentations, “Voice of the Customer Programs” detailed some of the benefits and challenges of deeply engaging users for product feedback. Though his thoughts were narrowly applied to creating user advisory committees, several of the issues he raise apply more broadly to online communities especially when some users in are given backstage access to product staff and/or special powers to moderate the actions of other users.
From one of Matt’s Voice slides, entitled Best Practices:
- All participants sign an NDA
- Limit tenure of participants
- 12 month tenure recommended
- Fresh perspective
- Avoid behavior problems/entitlement issues
- Remove non-constructive or disruptive users
- Require direct staff interaction in meetings, calls, and discussion forums
- Require all participant inquiries to go through Community team
Matt learned these best practices the hard away while he was at eBay. When they originally set up user advisory councils, which -amongst other things- gave users inside access to development and product management staff. Originally, they didn’t limit the tenure of a user on this council, and this lead to very bad problems as some of the users came to think of themselves as eBay insiders and became troublesome on their message boards. Some of these users would complain bitterly that they weren’t being listened to, or that eBay was not giving appropriate credit, etc.
Entitlement Defined
Experienced community managers describe this effect as user entitlement – when either early adopters or specially selected users are given special access or power, especially indefinitely. This creates a negative feedback environment in the community: new folks come to see it as cronyism and the established users see themselves as the elite and think that they have some measure of control over the company. This can lead to the company being unable to make needed significant changes, paralyzed by fear that the community backlash will cause irreparable harm. By never empowering special users indefinitely, you can help prevent the buildup of entitlement.
I think Matt’s bold bullets above may apply wherever you encounter entitlement – not only in user advisory councils, but whenever users are granted special powers or access either explicitly or implicitly.
Backlash Can Be Good
Yahoo! Finance message boards are a good counterexample – where the backlash is exactly what the company wanted. The message boards were a mess, anti-Semitism, racism, day trader wannabes spreading scandal and lies about companies – consistently this feature of Yahoo! Finance was listed as the worst. When we added threading and reputation, there was a hue and cry from the community: we’d made it less chatty and more about sharing stock information. We lost 25% of our page views immediately as a very small number of active users left the boards for someplace else they could chat the way they liked. But, something amazing happened, the quality of postings jumped significantly. The masses, who were readers – not posters, were able to provide feedback about what was good and what was not, and those who stayed (or started posting because things got better) started carrying on the conversations that we’d originally intended the boards for.
Lines of Control
There are three categories of control over an application/site:
- There are the things the company always decides on its own – These includes issues related to legal juristiction and government compliance, business model prioritization, branding and marketing, and the order that features and bugs will get fixed. The law of law and the budget.
- And there are the things that the community always decides – this usually includes the social customs of the interaction, what’s the most interesting/useful content, and if they will play with you at all. The law of two feet.
- Lastly there is the great in-between, where both the company and the community work together to figure out what is possible and profitable for the majority. This category is where user action is directly related to corporate re-action and vice-versa. Some common forms of this include creating extra content (tags, links, etc.) and user-moderation of other users’ content. This is where much of the gold in social media/online communities is, but it is a balancing act. If you detect entitlement, it’s a sure indicator that this category has become too broad. This is the law of tit-for-tat.
There must be clear lines about what the users can influence and what decisions belong solely to the company and these lines must be made clear on the site and by all staff that interact with users.
Yes! Empower users! But never forget that power should be limited and scope and time, and come with responsibilities on behavior.
Do not fear getting rid of bad apples (as long as you do it consistently) – they don’t really have the power over their peers that they think and they have been driving away even more users that you never hear from!
July 8, 2009
Online Gambling Patent: Another One Bites the Dust
For regular readers of Habitat Chronicles, it comes as no surprise that Lucasfilm’s Habitat, the first graphical virtual world with the first avatars, was the source of much innovation in the field. And this was back in the mid- to late-1980’s before people tried to patent software. As a result, those who created products like these are in some demand when later related patents were filed in the 1990s and now lawsuits a cropping up in an attempt to enforce them.
Another product during that period was called Rabbit Jack’s Casino, which allowed Quantum-Link users to play online gambling games such as Bingo, Poker, Slots, and Blackjack against each other for Q-Pons, chips that were not backed by real dollars, other than the $3.60 to $4.80 an hour people were paying for premium service access.
Rabbit Jack’s played an important role in getting an EU patent on online gambling [EP 0625760B1] declared invalid yesterday. Though I provided three sworn statements about Habitat, in the end the Honourable Lord Lewison did not need to site them in the decision. No matter – I was glad to be of help and to see the process in action.
Another one bites the dust!
March 25, 2009
Amy Bruckman: My selection for Ada Lovelace Day
Sometime circa 1993…
% telnet purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888
****************************
** Welcome to MediaMOO! **
****************************
PLEASE NOTE:
MediaMOO is a professional community, where people come to explore the future of media technology.
The operators of MediaMOO have provided the materials for the buildings of this community, but are not responsible for what is said or done in them. In particular, you must assume responsibility if you permit minors or others to access MediaMOO through your facilities. The statements and viewpoints expressed here are not necessarily those of the janitors, Amy Bruckman, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and those parties disclaim any responsibility for them.
login Randy somepassword
You are in F. Randall "Randy" Farmer's Office. You see a messy desk here.
@who
Player name Connected Idle time Location
----------- --------- --------- --------
Amy (#75) six days an hour Amy's Office
Randy (#???) 00:01 00:00 Randy's Office
@whois Amy
Amy is Amy Bruckman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
@join Amy
...
For those who didn’t know, yesterday was Ada Lovelace’s Birthday, and many of us that have blogs are writing a post about a woman of note in technology. I thought about my selection long and hard, as I know an amazing number of pioneering women doing amazing work who I admire and aspire-to greatly. After much thought, I went with someone in my area of specialization – social media. Someone who has been in the trenches learning about how people interact in real-time for more than 15 years. I chose Amy Susan Bruckman, because we share this particular road: the pursuit of improving mankind’s social interactions using computers and networks as intermediating tools.
Not many people were involved with virtual worlds, graphical or textual, in the late 1980s through 1990s. So few, in fact, that several of us formed something we called the Cyberspace Cabal – Pavel Curtis, Chip Morningstar, Amy Bruckman, and myself (with others joining over the few brief years we corresponded). We were the founders of a group hoping to help pound out the terminology of the future of real-time human computer mediated communications. Then came the World Wide Web in 1993 and over the next few years everything began to change. The Cabal drifted apart.
Most histories of MUD/MOO only give a brief mention to Amy’s first world – MediaMOO, which was established for media researchers to network and share research and best practices. It even served as the testbed for one of the first experiments in virtual community self-governance with the formation of all-user elected ruling council. MediaMOO fostered many other experiments in collaborative object creation that provided many lessons that are echoed in modern virtual worlds such as Second Life today.
Amy carried these insights on into her graduate work at MIT, where she spawned a new derivative of the MOO platform called MOOSE Crossing – designed especially for children to create their own virtual objects, complete with programmable behaviors. In fact, my son created some of his first working code in that world.
Since then, she has moved from MIT to Georgia Tech where continues the good fight for making computers accessible tools for children and the masses by establishing the Electronic Learning Communities lab and the Opportunities in Computing program to house all the great work by her and now her students.
Though she’s already received numerous awards from her peers for being a pioneer in this area, I chose to single her out today for her unwavering and clear focus on the positive benefits on online community and for her continued personal efforts to keep the research community connected.
Thanks for being there Amy! Especially back when most academics were dismissing online community work as being only “by men, for men.”
(See the wikipedia article on her for all the links and details that probably should have been in this tribute.)
AdaLovelaceDay09March 1, 2009
Reputation and Context, March 19th, OCBF in Sonoma
I (Randy) will be leading a session on Reputation and Context at the Online Community Business Forum in Sonoma, Califonia on March 19th and 20th.
My session is currently scheduled to be an hour-long breakout at 2:30 on the 19th. I’m currently thinking of limiting the amount of context-setting material to about 10 minutes and having the rest be a working session for helping people sort out their reputation contexts, models, and abuse mitigation issues. If you’re planning on attending, feedback here about what you’d like to see from my session is strongly desired – leave a comment below or drop me an email.
I’ve attended the ForumOne Community events for several years now and found them to be invaluable. This year should be no exception. The program is still evolving, but already has an impressive list of innovators and stalwarts of Online Communities speaking and leading sessions.
Some seats are still available. Just visit the OCBF Registration page, enter the password sonoma and the discount code farmer at checkout and you will save $150.00
February 17, 2009
FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm's Habitat in Rogue Leaders
Recently, GameSetWatch published an excerpt from Rogue Leaders about Lucasfilm’s Habitat which includes several new images and wonderful details.
Unfortunately, it also contains several factual and categorical errors that need to be corrected in the public record since this book’s account has already been used to incorrectly update Habitat’s Wikipedia page.
This article will block-quote the relevant sections of the book, followed by factual corrections marked as FACT CHECK: or commentary marked with either Chip: or Randy: as appropriate.
Q-Link, as it was known, undercut that price to around $3.60 an hour by renting out spare, unused server space during low-usage times.
FACT CHECK: The underused, and therefore discounted, resource was not servers, but off-peak packet-switching network bandwidth.
Through this partnership a deal was hatched to produce an online game, with Lucasfilm Games creating the front-end game — Habitat — on the Commodore 64, and Q-Link producing the back-end, server-side software.
FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm also developed a large portion of the backend. Q-Link, lead by Janet Hunter, did the stuff that had to interface with their system, but Lucasfilm did the game-specific stuff.
Designer Noah Falstein had been working with one of the team engineers, Chip Morningstar, on the game concept.
Chip: That’s a little backwards. The original concept emerged from a collaboration between Noah and me, but the design itself was mine. We were all peers with the same title, “Designer/Programmer”, with an equal emphasis on concept and implementation.
Randy: See Chip’s post on the beginnings of Habitat for a detailed account those early days.
The game debuted internally at Lucasfilm Games at a company meeting in early 1988.
…
It looked like Habitat was a huge hit-in-the-making, and so in the fall of 1988 the beta was taken to a New York nightclub for a launch party as Lucasfilm Games and Q-Link prepared to revolutionize gaming.
FACT CHECK: Summer and Fall 1986, after the game had first been shown to selected industry and press people at the Chicago CES in June.
Randy: Watch the Habitat Promotional Video and it’s copyright date for verification.
Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network’s entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack’s Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. “The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful,” recalls Arnold.
Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.
From a business perspective, however, Habitat wasn’t a failure. The game was licensed to Fujitsu for use on its FM Towns PC-like platform, and the successor to Habitat was recast (with several of the original planned features now cut) as Corpe Caribe, described as an online Club Med, where it enjoyed some success.
FACT CHECK: The shipped product was Club Caribe, not “Corpe Caribe”. :: sigh ::
Chip: While there were some performance tuning issues that needed to be addressed, the cost of operations was never really the issue. Statements about performance considerations were a face saving way of covering for the what Q-Link perceived as the real problem, which was marketing risk. Basically, the product was so weird and out of the mainstream that they didn’t think they knew how to sell it. In particular, for some reason they felt that people would be put off by the fantasy and science fiction elements. We argued that this defied everything we knew from the history of computer games, but they believed their typical user was far more conventional and unimaginative than the typical game purchaser.
FACT CHECK: Club Caribe was Habitat and it was released commercially by Q-Link. It opened in January 1988 with the name change and a different marketing spin. Literally the only difference between the original Habitat client software and the Club Caribe software as shipped was the title screen image.
Chip: Basically, Q-Link reworked the world database to remove any of the objects that had any kind of fantasy or science fictional flavor. The idea was to make the world seem more ordinary, pitching it as a virtual resort. Notably, they didn’t use any avatar heads that were non-human.
Chip: Over the course of the first six months of operation, as they grew more comfortable with their users, all these pointless restrictions were eventually abandoned.
The licensing to Fujitsu for the FM Towns happened a couple years later.
Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, the two programming gurus who had built the system infrastructure
Chip and Randy: That’s a slight mischaracterization of our role. While we certainly programmed it, we think it’s more noteworthy that Chip designed the whole thing, and Randy ran the world. Both the design itself and our operational experience with it are arguably quite a bit more important to the historical significance of Habitat than was its implementation.
Randy: Well, except that we managed to get a virtual world client shoe-horned into a 1-megahertz, 300-baud, 64k-memory computer with a 165k floppy disk! Certainly not a fact of wide ranging repercussions, but still pretty damn impressive.
December 29, 2008
The Demise of the Word Balloon Patent
or How IMVU, Bruce Damer and I Saved Blizzard a Million Dollars and They Don’t Even Know It
Patent Trolls Piss Me Off
The latest news about Worlds.com, Inc. joining a long line of virtual world patent trolls has pissed me off.
You can always tell a patent troll because they are not actively developing or marketing the supposed “protected” technology and the patents are a decade old and they had previously turned a blind-eye to possible infringing use, then sold them to lawyers (or just retained a trolling firm) to generate cash to keep a portion of their anemic business on life-support by shaking down the gaming and virtual world industry. In the U.S. the big money target is Blizzard’s and their global monster hit: World of Warcraft. These lawyers don’t go after Blizzard straight away. That’d be stupid, since that company has the deep enough pockets to tell them to pound sand, and on the chance they might even become inspired take active countermeasures [as happened with the case I am going to share with you today]. Instead, they’ll first go after a few little guys who can’t really defend themselves; get them to roll over and pay just to establish a precedent. Then, armed with the claim that the industry has obviously accepted the validity of their patent – start the proceedings against the larger worlds, and eventually hit up the big guys – Linden Lab/Second Life and Blizzard/World of Warcraft.
I know about this particular pattern first hand, as Bruce Damer and I helped IMVU ‘s founder Will Harvey (et al.) defend against one of these terrible patent suits, and all the parties involved ended up limping away with limited victories.
Software Patents are Newer than Virtual Worlds
For the last several years, I’ve been doing a lot of patent consulting since I was one of the principle developers of Lucasfilm’s Habitat /QLink’s Club Caribe (the first graphical virtual world), which existed in the mid-1980s, before people even thought they could make money patenting software. This means that the stuff invented for Habitat is NOT PATENTED and is PRIOR ART to be used to defend against many early and bogus virtual world-related patents. Seriously folks, there are patents out there with claims like generating a random number on a server that is authoritative for chance events when received by clients. Really? “You can’t trust the client” was novel as late as 1996? I don’t think so! And I have the software, documentation, and widely cited white papers to prove it.
The Word Balloon Lawsuit
Three years ago, on November 3rd, 2005 Forterra Systems, the company formerly known as There.com, filed suit against Avatar Factory and William “Will” D. Harvey in US District court for Patent Infringement. The suit was all about US patent number 6,784,901 Method, system and computer program product for the delivery of a chat message in a 3D multi-user environment
Abstract
A chat system, method and computer program product for delivering a message between a sender and a recipient in a three-dimensional (3D) multi-user environment, wherein the 3D multi-user environment maintains respective digital representations of the sender and the recipient, uses a recipient interface to receive a message, map the message to a texture to generate a textured message, and render the textured message in the 3D multi-user environment so as to permit the recipient to visually ascertain the location of the digital representation of the sender in the 3D world. Received messages are mantained as two-dimensional elements on a recipient viewport.
- Inventors: Harvey; William D. (Palo Alto, CA), McHugh; Jason G. (East Palo Alto, CA); Paiz; Fernando J. (Millbrae, CA), Ventrella; Jeffrey J. (San Francisco, CA)
- Assignee: There (Menlo Park, CA)
- Filed: August 31, 2000
- Granted: August 31, 2004
You can find all the details about this case online by entering the case number 95000155 here – there are thousands of pages of documents. I am not a lawyer, I’m a storyteller, and was just one of many people who played a non-trivial role in determining the primary outcome.
I like to call this action the Word Balloon Lawsuit since the claims in question are primarily about displaying chat messages in word balloons that float over an avatar’s head in a virtual world. Forterra was claiming they had a patent on them and IMVU was infringing and should stop or pay up.
You probably noticed in the patent office excerpt above that the primary inventor on the Patent is the same name as the primary individual defendant – Will Harvey. Will filed the patent while he was still a founder and member of the virtual world and company There (which was later renamed Forterra Systems). After leaving There, Will founded IMVU – another 3D avatar chat system – dropping the virtual world from the original idea altogether and just keeping the best lessons about avatars and user-created clothing, objects, and environments.
The Word Balloon Suit against IMVU seemed shrewd on Forterra’s part for several reasons:
- IMVU, on the surface, had features that looked in many ways similar to those in There.
- IMVU was small and not cash-rich and unlikely to put up a protracted fight, or any fight at all.
- By being an Inventor on the patent in question, Will’s options to defend himself would be limited because of the legal principle of Estoppel. For example, he couldn’t claim that the patent was invalid, since he signed the application saying that it was valid when it was filed.
Archivists To the Rescue!
January 9th, 2006 I received an email from Will that started:
“Thought you might be able to help me on something and simultaneously help stop some bad people from blatantly abusing the patent system by egregiously
asserting intellectual property rights that they don’t own.”
He was looking for support in the form of screen shots, articles, and even physical media that proved prior art to break the patent. He continued:
“… of course I know that we at There.com did not invent the idea of chat balloons, but There.com is trying to give the patent a broader interpretation than was intended and claim that they own idea of chat balloons […] something they didn’t even invent!”
He also contacted virtual worlds pioneer, author and archivist Bruce Damer. I was probably the most vocal co-creator of the first two or three generations of graphical virtual worlds and Bruce had a broad, almost ecumenical view of the entire field. Bruce’s book Avatars, is a catalog of the state of virtual worlds as of 1997 and would also play a key role in the final decision.
After reviewing the patent, it was obvious to me that Will’s interpretation was right – the patent was not meant to cover all 3D word balloons, it was something he called “Chat Wads” – to me a ho-hum idea of little indicators that the user is typing flying through the virtual world to the balloon. That interpretation might be innovative, but certainly no one had copied it. Stretching it to cover all word balloons? No way!
IMVU was based in Palo Alto, where I live, so Will and I had a face to face chat at a coffee shop downtown. He seemed understandably preoccupied with the personal ramifications. I said something like “Dude! I’m not just doing this for you – they aren’t just after you! If you cave or lose, they’re going after bigger fish. You aren’t the real target. They’re after Blizzard! They figure you’re easy pick’ns given that you have to defend yourself with one-hand tied behind your back and a limited legal budget.”
Bruce and I independently agreed to help with Will’s defense of this case not only for him or IMVU, but for virtual righteousness.
Bruce and I produced piles of prior art – for products such as Lucasfilm’s Habitat (1986), Club Caribe (1988), Fujitsu Habitat (1990), Sony’s Community Place (1995), WorldsAway (1996), The Palace (1996), ECHabitats/Microcosm (1997), and more. We provided screen shots, videos, white papers, published articles, and other patents. I even remember demonstrating ECHabitat’s 3D word balloon system to Will Harvey at Bruce Damer’s Avatars97 conference. I was even able to point to online conference photos that included myself and clearly EC Habitat with visible balloons.
The best defense is…
On July 17th, 2006 – IMVU requested a Patent Reexamination for the patent claims in question. If the request was granted this would allow the USPTO to review the patent more closely and potentially throw out invalid claims. This was a risky move, because if the PTO refused to reexamine, or even worse, reviewed and upheld the patent, it would be a disaster for IMVU. But, at this point the examiner’s research would now include all of the court record to date, including the comprehensive submissions of prior art that Bruce and I provided.
The Decision
On October 17th, 2007, after almost two years and 137 separate legal filings the lawsuit was Dismissed With Prejudice.
Bruce Damer wrote me:
I was told that the presiding federal judge [The Honorable Patricia V. Trumbull] upon denying all the claims of Forterra held up a copy of my 1997 book “Avatars” and said something like “not only are all of your claims predated by the prior art but that prior art is all contained in this one book which was published two years before the patent was filed…”. I like to think that she then slammed the book down on the bench, gavel-like, but wasn’t there to witness this.
The lawsuit was dead, but the patent reexamination was still underway.
The Danger of Suing with Bad Patents: Reexamination
Losing the suit wasn’t the end of the bad results for Forterra.
Almost one year later, on October 7th, 2008 the US Patent Office issued a Reexamination Certificate, numbered 95/000,155 that invalidates all of the claims in question – gutting the patent for use in future lawsuits against 3D chat systems.
Virtual worlds with chat balloons past, present, and future could rest a little easier, even if they didn’t know it. Blizzard dodged a bullet. You’re welcome guys. :-)
Epilog: Goliath’s Rage
Forterra was beaten, twice.
In a Hollywood-inspired universe, this would be the end of the story: Rationality and the little guy triumph, the free (virtual) world is saved, and the big bully goes home with his proverbial tail between his legs, right?
But this is the real world of angry losers.
Will Harvey had really pissed off someone with a lot of money. Forterra filed a new and unrelated lawsuit that seems to me to be attempting to make IMVU pay for the lost potential revenue as a result of defeating the chat-balloon patent suit. Unlike with British tort law, where losers pay much of the winner’s legal costs, in the US civil courts it often ends up that the one with the most cash can continue to sue the little guy over and over, making him spend dollar-for-dollar the same amount of money with no real recourse. Deepest pockets can force a financial draw.
This later suit was eventually settled for undisclosed terms to presumably just get the whole matter behind them. As a side effect of the settlement, if it weren’t for this post, you probably would have never heard about any of this. But, you see, I never signed anything. :-) And the patent (re)examiner pulled the entire court proceedings into the web-accessible public record!
So that’s a free tip for you: Civil court documents become a part of the USPTO’s Patent Reexamination process. Amazing what you can find on the web these days.
But, Word Balloons are Free!
So, IMVU and Will Harvey took one on the chin for the rest of us. I say Huzzah! to them! They did us all a big favor.
Too many companies just cave when stuff like this comes along. It takes real courage to stand up and say “Hey! That’s not right!” Especially to Patent Trolls. So, if you see Will at a conference somewhere, say “Thanks Man!” He can’t talk about any of it, but hopefully with this blog post and the story spreading through the social network, maybe he doesn’t have to.
Patents weren’t created so that people can sue each other into the ground, they were created specifically to allow an individual (and eventually a company) to have a limited exclusive period to develop and market their invention. They are meant for defense. Something has gone horribly wrong that people who aren’t developing or marketing an invention at all are just applying scatter-shot legal action on the hopes of a big payoff. This sets the wrong kind of incentives for the creation of patents – see or think of a clever idea – patent it quick, without actually understanding if it is novel or common or has prior art. Or, if you patent something you think is novel, wait years as others use a similar idea to build successful products and then spring from the trees shouting “Ah ha! I got you! We’ll just sort it all out in court.” After all, if you can patent a method of swinging on a (tree) swing, you can patent anything!
Disclosure
I do not categorically object to patents. I have several granted patents and about the same number pending approval – filing defensive patents is unfortunately required by the current business environment . There are two Fujitsu patents that are in my name that Chip and I refused to sign because of prior art, and I have copies the legal paper trail to prove it – so if Fujitsu shows up at your door claiming to have the patent on the virtual world, you know where to find us.