Legal Geek No. 85: Activision Blizzard wins some and loses some in Patent Law

Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we review some recent patent cases for one of our favorite game developers Activision Blizzard to see how the Warcraft is going in the patent world for them.

https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp85


At the beginning of this month, two decisions came down from judges in patent disputes involving Activision Blizzard.

In the first case, Activision is being sued along with other defendants for allegedly infringing 6 patents from a company called Acceleration Bay. The patents cover technology that interacts with broadcast channels to allow players to connect and communicate in certain ways for multiplayer gaming experiences.

Acceleration Bay initially filed their lawsuit in Delaware, where Activision and others are incorporated. During a break in that lawsuit given by the Delaware court to fix defects in the initial Complaint, Activision filed what is called a Declaratory Judgment action in California trying to move the dispute over the patents and their validity to their home jurisdiction courts. However, the California judge dismissed the case because Activision's incorporation in Delaware makes that a valid place for the company to have to defend against this lawsuit. In the words of the court, Activision cannot have its cake by incorporating there and eat it too by forcing litigation against them out of Delaware to a more convenient home jurisdiction of California.

These battles over where a case is litigated are typical, and it may not make a difference depending on how the merits of this patent infringement claim come out in the future. Still, it's a loss for Activision.

Better news came in the second case, where Blizzard is being sued with some other defendants for infringing a patent owned by Parallel Networks for game downloader software. Battle.net was specifically in the crosshairs as a possible infringement of patent claims covering a downloader program that reassigns which blocks of data the downloader receives based on demand.

However, this case did not even make it to a jury, as the Delaware judge in this case decided on summary judgment that no reasonable juror could find that Battle.net performs the claimed method of operation. Basically, the reallocation of blocks of data in the Parallel Networks patent cannot be equated with reordering how content is downloaded based on customer demand, which is how Battle.net works when multiple patches are available, according to the judge. It's a highly technical distinction, but it was sufficient to overcome this infringement case, at least until appeal.

The Bottom Line is, large companies like Activision Blizzard are inevitably tied up in IP litigation disputes at all times, and you inevitably win some and lose some in those battles. Even through these two decisions went opposite ways, a loss in a jurisdiction battle is much less important than the dismissal of the Parallel Networks infringement case. So, all in all, September was a good month for Activision Blizzard in the legal landscape.

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