Patent Madness: Yahoo Owns the Patent for Initiating a Game from an Instant Messenger

Behold Yahoo’s US patent 6,699,125:

… The game server includes logic to operate a multiplayer game using inputs from and outputs to an active game set of game clients, wherein game clients other than those in the active game set can join an active game by supplying the game server with a reference to the active game. Additionally, logic is included for coupling a game client to a messenger client to allow the game client to send the messenger client data used to initiate joining a game, whereby a message sent by the messenger client includes the data used to initiate joining a game.

Now, apart from the complete blatant obviousness of this idea – use an instant messenging system to initiate a game – I think the amount of prior art for this one is staggering.
Just in my own small part of the world, people were discussing this idea as early as 1997, and browsing through my own emails, I can see I first implemented a program quite similar to the patent in early 1999. They applied for the patent in 2001. I am sure thousands of other people have done the same, much earlier.

So obviously Yahoo is sueing some former employees for infringing this patent.

The good news recently was that the European Union has postponed a decision to implement software patents here, but we are not immune to the effects of the US Patent office. (And I believe the European Patent Office has already awarded software-like patents.)

I should say that I am not particularly anti-patent, but a patent system is never better than its implementation – obviousness and prior art have to matter.

This madness has to stop.