A California Court ruled last week in favor of Blizzard, finding that Scapegaming (a.k.a. Alyson Reeves) ran an unauthorized secondary market that handled microtransactions in violation of the World of Warcraft terms of service. Blizzard sued Scapegaming last October for copyright infringement. The court awarded about $88 million dollars, including…
A federal court dismissed on summary judgment most of the copyright infringement claims against Google, ruling, in part, that Plaintiff’s notices were not compliant with the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). As a result, the court found that Google was entitled to “safe harbor” protection under various…
A patent infringement suit targeting a multiplayer, networking feature of Microsoft’s Xbox video game console was dismissed because the court found that, based on how the patent claims were written, the Xbox’s network connectivity mechanism differed from that required in the patent. This case, like many patent infringement cases, turned…
On July 23, 2010, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California entered an order denying Facebook Inc.’s motion to dismiss a second amended complaint alleging that Facebook is guilty of contributing to the copyright infringement of a video game. Judge Alsup denied Facebook’s…
According to a press release today, the Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Playdom Inc., one of the leading companies in the fast-growing business of online social gaming for $563 million plus an earn out of up to $200 million more. According to the release, in just two and…
Internet businesses that are more that passive host sites should take note that a French court found that eBay is a “publisher of online brokering services” because it goes beyond “purely technical, automatic and passive [site host] services.” As a result it ruled that eBay did not qualify for the…
We recently reported on the Facebook v. Power Ventures case, in which Facebook alleged, among other things, that Power.com using automated tools to populate a portal that aggregates a user’s social networking profiles violates its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and an analogous provision of…
An appellate court ruled that an employee’s agreement to assign “inventions” to Mattel may not cover “ideas” the employee had for the Bratz line of dolls. This ruling may impact many companies ownership of certain rights if their IP or invention assignment agreements are not clear enough. In vacating the…
Venture Beat recently reported on the results of a virtual goods study that showed about 75% of online games users have bought virtual goods and that many users surveyed plan to spend more in the next 12 months. This survey is one more confirmation of the rapid growth of virtual…
Augmented Planet Ltd. indicates that as of the end of June 2010, a search of the App Store revealed nearly 400 applications found by searching “augmented reality” and nearly 100 more that were augmented reality apps but didn’t use those words. In comparison, prior to September 2009, there were less…