Not to rain on your possibly good Monday morning but it seems as though another patent troll has reared its ugly head and this time it has its sight set on Mojang, Electronic Arts, Square Enix and a few other large gaming companies. This new lawsuit is over a rather vague patent that these companies are apparently infringing upon.
The patent in question, held by a company called Uniloc who filed the lawsuit in Texas which seems to be the going trend these days, deals with the prevention of unauthorized access to data. The lawsuit is targeting Minecraft: Pocket Edition on Android in particular. The simplified definition of this patent is as follows:
A system and method … for preventing unauthorized access to electronic data stored on an electronic device.
Uniloc is stating that Mojang and others did not have permissions or consent to use this ‘system’ in their products and have filed a lawsuit based on this. As you can imagine, Notch has already posted his thoughts on the whole matter first in a Twitter post before taking to his blog and typing up a bit more of a detailed opinion. You can view the official lawsuit declaration in PDF form here thanks to Notch uploading it for everyone to check out.
As more details come out over this lawsuit, we will be sure to keep everyone up-to-date. I would like to point out though that Uniloc got Minecraft’s name wrong in the declaration, spelling it as “Mindcraft”.
Thanks to Scott Q. for the tip!
Website Referenced: Minecraft Forums
