Social games giant Zynga can't seem to stay out of court; either they are suing someone or someone is suing them. Today they are being sued by a company called Agincourt. Agincourt filed the lawsuit in a Delaware federal court this week, citing Zynga's history of imitating other companies' products and alleging that the Farmville maker has violated patents it holds related to in-game prize redemption. Specifically the patents relate to processes for credit card payments and online prize redemption. Agincourt is seeking damages and a court order preventing Zynga from using its patents.
"Agincourt's patents cover the most lucrative aspects of online social gaming – including those comprising the bulk of Zynga's revenues – as they contain the crucial 'link' that allows for global, interactive prize redemption over the Internet," said Bill Carmody, senior partner at Susman Godfrey, the law firm representing Agincourt in the case.
The games that allegedly violate these patents include Mafia Wars, FarmVille, CityVille, FrontierVille, and Empires & Allies.
Zynga has made no public comment on this lawsuit.
Comments
Re: Zynga Sued by Agincourt
patin overhall can we has it?
this is retarted the us patint systum is so fucked up we need to revise it so crap like this doesint hapin.
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am dyslexic and have a learning disablement from when i died as a baby and sustained brain damage do to lack of oxygen pleas pardon my bad spelling and grammar-
Re: Zynga Sued by Agincourt
Patents my ass. Software is a set of instructions, you can't patent instructions. Yet somehow they do anyway.
-Greevar
"Paste superficially profound, but utterly meaningless quotation here."
Re: Zynga Sued by Agincourt
You can patent processes, implementations, and business methods. Even before software patents, a majority of patents in the US were granted on processes.