The patent troll sued the manufacturer of the game Minecraft ... or Mindcraft

On July 20, Uniloc v. Mojang AB, a Swedish company owned by Marcus Persson, better known as Notch, the author of the cult game Minecraft, filed a lawsuit against claimants in patent cases in the Eastern District District of Texas. The subject of the lawsuit is the alleged violation by Mojang AB of patent No. 6,857,067 - “System and method for preventing unauthorized access to electronic data”, which describes a method for authorizing data access based on the use of smart cards. The plaintiff believes that the version of the game Minecraft for the Android platform violates this patent. Perhaps it is meant that the user authorization system uses the SIM card of the phone or tablet as the very smart card from the patent. However, from the claim it is very difficult to understand the essence of the claims. In addition, the very name of the game is written with an error - “Mindcraft” instead of “Minecraft”. Identical claims filed the same day against Electronic Arts’s Bejeweled2 and eight other companies.

Uniloc is not the first year of war with the whole world in the courts. On her account - more than seventy lawsuits against a variety of software companies, including Sony, Activision and Blizzard. The most famous trophy is Microsoft. The litigation with Bill Gates’s company began in 2003. It was about 388,000,000 (yes, almost half a billion!) Dollars of compensation for using the activation system in the key products of the corporation - Windows XP, Office, Windows Server. According to Uniloc lawyers, it is suspiciously similar to the patent registration system No. 5,490,216 described in Rick Richardson’s (founder of Uniloc) patent No. 5,490,216 . Eight years the courts of different instances dealt with the case, and in the end Microsoft had to make concessions and pay compensation , the amount of which was not disclosed.

Notch said on his Twitter account that he would not make concessions and was ready to spend a lot of money on the trial. He added that software patents are evil in their pure form and only hinder innovation.

Richardson himself does not consider himself a troll, but prefers to be called a "serial inventor." He is proud to be able to defend his rights in a battle with such a giant as Microsoft. On one of the pages on the personal website, he lists a long list of his inventions , including “label removal spray”, “home hydro battery”, “magnetic machine”, “digital oven” and many other amazing and mysterious things. More than forty patents are registered in his name. He lives in Australia and spends most of his working time in a mobile office equipped inside a minibus, which he calls "DickMobile".
')
UPD: On Sunday, Notch on his blog explained why he considers software patents counterproductive, vicious and ruinous. Here is a translation of his post .