‘Grand Theft Auto’ win upheld in networking patent appeal
The publisher of “Grand Theft Auto Online”, “NBA 2K15” and “NBA 2K16” has dodged infringement claims over gaming network patents, according to a Federal Circuit ruling.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dismissed the appeal from patent holder Acceleration Bay accusing games publisher Take-Two Interactive and the games developers Rockstar Games and 2K Sports of infringing its networking patents.
Writing for the panel, circuit judge Jimmie Reyna also dismissed infringement claims based on two other Acceleration Bay patents for mootness. The appeal was found to be moot as Acceleration Bay only challenged one of “multiple independent grounds” articulated in the US District Court for the District of Delaware’s summary judgment.
The precedential decision handed down yesterday, 10 October, closes proceedings on the more than five-year-long dispute between the parties
‘Broad implications’
Jonathan Bowser, counsel at Haynes Boone said that the ruling appeared to have “broad implications for distributed computing techniques that create a virtual network among interconnected computing devices”.
An alternate ruling could have resulted in the game developers having to reconfigure their online features, according to Anthony Del Monaco, partner at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garret & Dunner.
“Take-Two could try to remove or design around the alleged infringing functionality to avoid having to pay additional royalty payments moving forward for ongoing infringement,” Del Monaco told WIPR.
Issues addressed
Acceleration Bay claimed that the gamemakers infringed US patents 6,701,34, 6,714,966, 6,910,069 and 6,920,497, which relate to a networking system where individual computers are connected and organised via a virtual network.
Take-Two asked the appellate court to uphold the Delaware Court’s summary judgment of non-infringement for the ‘069 and ‘497 patents, and argued that the appeal of decisions related to the ‘344 and ‘966 patents were moot.
Specifically, Take-Two argued that Acceleration Bay’s appeal only challenged one of multiple grounds related to the district court’s ruling on the ‘344 and ‘966 patents.
Judge Reyna agreed, dismissing appeals related to the ‘344 and ‘966 patents, and upheld the District Court’s ruling that the games’ networking solutions were not similar enough to those detailed in the ‘344 and ‘966 patents to constitute infringement.
“Significantly, the Federal Circuit found that the defendant (Take-Two) was not an ‘assembler’ of the technology because the defendant’s software, by itself, did not create the hardware components that allegedly infringed the claims at issue. Rather, the customers completed the system by installing the software on their computer hardware systems,” Bowser added.
Case background
Acceleration Bay first filed a complaint with the Delaware Court in April 2015, which the court later dismissed the case for lacking prudential standing as the patents-in-suit were assigned to Aerospace giant Boeing at the time.
Acceleration Bay entered into an amended and restated patent purchase agreement to reassign the patents, filing a second complaint with the court in June 2016.
From 2017 to 2018, the court issued a series of claim construction orders, particularly related to the term “m-regular”.
Judge Richard Andrews granted Take-Two’s motion for summary judgment in March 2020, concluding that the architecture of the networking features of “Grand Theft Auto Online” “shared some of the same general purposes” but not enough to constitute infringement.
Andrews found that the “NBA 2K” games network relied on a central relay server, which was “fundamentally different” from Acceleration Bay’s “m-regular” network detailed in the asserted patents.
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