Our next guest speaker is Ms. Jennifer Kelly, partner of Fenwick & West’s litigation group in San Francisco. Her practice focuses on commercial and intellectual property litigation, with a particular emphasis on copyright, trademark, trade secret, false advertising, and unfair competition disputes for technology companies.
She has been involved in really interesting cases in areas such as cloud computing, copyright infringement and commercial class actions. Her clients include many well known companies:
Antares Audio Technologies
BlackRock
Capcom Entertainment
CBS Interactive
Gearbox Software
Intuit
ngmoco
SEGA of America
Tonnellerie Saury
She has indicated to us that she will focus her presentation on discussions about disputes between developers and how she goes about analyzing potential copyright claims in the game space. She will also touch on where the line falls between copyright infringement and lawful copying, something that she regularly advise her clients on.
Fun fact to note: the producer of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead filed suit against Capcom, claiming the zombies-in-a-mall action game Dead Rising ripped off the classic 1979 horror film. Jon also mentioned this case in class. Jennifer was counsel representing Capcom in trial. Her victory (a dismissal of all claims, with prejudice, on an initial motion to dismiss) cleared the path for Dead Rising 2, which was released in 2010.
Lastly, we also stumbled upon an article that she co-authored on EA v Zynga, which is a really interesting read. Follow the link if you are interested: http://www.fenwick.com/publications/Pages/Electronic-Arts-v-Zynga-Real-Dispute-Over-Virtual-Worlds.aspx
I think back to my childhood of some of my favorite games and realize the concept of “chance” played an important role. In many games, the system is made to utilize random chance to extend playability. A game like World of Warcraft utilizes this in item/loot drops. Each enemy has a specified probability of dropping a range of loot. The entire game is just pressing a variety of keys on an elaborate slot machine where the reward is loot instead of monetary credits.
One of Blizzard’s other hit franchises, “Diablo” has gambling functions within the game. The in-game gold is used to purchase unknown item classes with variable stats. This may or may not have been the reason so many users spent countless hours farming the in-game currency. I see little difference in using real Canadian dollars to purchase the in-game currency, and then use these “credits” to purchase items with randomly assigned values; and then potentially “cashing out” by selling these items back in exchange for real world currencies.
Are we training our children to keep pushing the neuro-gratification button? When the games become boring will they make their way to the slot machines? The exploitative American gambling laws we heard about today in Nevada – will the people ever need to leave their computer chairs? When the system is set up such that the “house” slowly dwindles your money while distracting you with flashy lights; or perhaps worse, makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something by destroying a game sprite demon of some kind — do these people even have a …chance?
A few weeks ago I alluded in class to the lawsuit facing my favourite (ok, pretty well the only) commercial flight sim X-Plane which appears to be in quite a fight against a “patent assertion entity”.
Some really cool cloud features, including gamers remotely being able to take over their friends’ controllers if they get stuck. I’m very curious about the new Xbox and hope that this new piece of news today will provide the impetus for Microsoft to leak some details soon!
As we’ve talked about, now is the time to focus on papers topics & getting started (or better) on them. Attached is a link to a very useful paper by Stephen M. McJohn, which for your purposes is a nice overview of interesting 2012 U.S. IP cases. By going through the paper you might well end up thinking about a few topics you have not thought of, or considering issues you have looked at but through an additional lens.
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