Today we're going to talk about frivolity. Merriam Webster defines frivolous as:

1 a : of little weight or importance b : having no sound basis (as in fact or law) [a frivolous lawsuit]
2 a : lacking in seriousness b : marked by unbecoming levity

Basically, something that is not important, not serious, or without basis. Most if not all things are relative, and measures of importance certainly belong to the category of relative things. What I have for lunch today may be important to me, but I'm sure it doesn't qualify as important to you.

This week is the week of frivolous lawsuits.

Follow up:

Paraphrased from the Boston Globe:

Turbine Inc., makers of Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Asheron's Call; Japan's Sony Corp., maker of the online game Everquest; Activision Blizzard Inc., whose World of Warcraft is the world’s most popular subscription-based online game; NCSoft Corp. of South Korea, maker of the game Guild Wars and Aion; and the British firm Jagex Ltd., which produces the online game Runescape have been named in a patent infringement lawsuit that targets several of the world’s largest online gaming firms.

Paltalk of Jericho, N.Y., filed a complaint in the US District Court in Marshall, Texas, one of the nation’s most popular venues for patent lawsuits. “The eastern district of Texas is considered a plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction,’’ said Christopher Donnelly, a partner at Donnelly Conroy & Gelhaar LLP in Boston.

In 2002, Paltalk purchased two patents from a company called HearMe, covering technologies for sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment. Paltalk claims that the data-sharing technologies used in online games violate those patents.

The Wall Street Journal just covered another interesting lawsuit:

A company owned by the founders of Skype filed a copyright suit against eBay Inc. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, Skype's founders, sold Skype to Ebay in 2005. They continued to work for Skype until 2007. Now 2 years later they want to terminate a licensing agreement with eBay which allows eBay (and therefore Skype) to use the peer to peer communications technology that Skype is based on. If successful, this may cause a shutdown of Skype in its current form.

There are two things that stand out about both the Skype lawsuit and the Paltalk lawsuit. Both involve technology that handles the way computers talk to each other. Both lawsuits seek to make "now" more important than "then". Friis and Zennstrom already sold Skype to Ebay, and now want to take away what they sold. Paltalk bought a patent in 2002 and want to use it against software that has been in existence since 1999. This "now" rather than 'then' is a way to revise history, there's even a Latin term for it: nunc pro tunc.

Computers need to talk to each other just as people need to communicate. The idea that protocols handling the way computers talk to each other should be patented is just as silly patenting the English language. You could make a case that Merriam and Webster, the owners of the English language "now" should file a claim on all English language works produced in the past, "then". Nunc pro tunc!

It's sad that the United States is renowned for lawsuit frivolity. It's amusing that filing frivolous lawsuits is just as much a game as say, World of Warcraft is. Paltalk of New York files in Texas because they have a court there that is more likely to produce the ruling they seek. I'd like to play another kind of game with frivolous lawsuits: put them on the internet and let people just vote them out of existence with a mouse click; thumbs up for good ones, thumbs down for silly ones.

I'd like to sum this up with a quote I stole from a forum commenting on the Paltalk suit.

I just patented "taking air into one's lungs by flexing one's diaphram and expelling remaining gases afterwards.", so I'm going to be watching you folks like a hawk.

I don't mind stealing the quote, because words are still free to use, and I bet you the author of that quote won't sue me.


Your wiki of the week is nunc pro tunc!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunc_pro_tunc

I had a pizza tortilla for lunch, by the way. I just lightly bake a four tortilla shell then add marinara sauce, shredded cheeses, and taco sauce and bake that until the cheese bubbles lightly. Seasoned with basil, oregano, garlic and crushed red pepper it is always excellent and easy to make.