Xfire lawsuit

[Czechmate]

Because it's free and good, Yahoo has sued Xfire over copyright infringement, and now Xfire has filed a countersuit. Here are the details:

http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?name=XFire&file=cmspage&body=xf_pr_20050310

And, you can even sign a petition to stop it. This probably does no good, but it can't hurt and you can do it anonymously.

http://www.petitiononline.com/Xfire/petition.html

~Czech

[Pallidrone]

Wow. I never knew that Thresh was a founder for that company. Dude was a bad ass Quake player way back when.

[Sasha]

I think this lawsuit is just a bunch of bullshit. Another instance of a big company trying to knock out the little guy that is successful. Xfire says they have over a million users in 100 different countries. Can you imagine if ALL of those users boycotted yahoo, I think that might cause a little ripple. Besides.. code is code is it not? I mean you can only code a certain way to get a certain function correct? blah this is just stupid and it makes me mad.

[Czechmate]

Well, code is code to a certain degree, but some algoritthms and such can be and are copyrighted. Last year, SCO sued pretty much anyone involved with Linux because of infringement, basically saying that some of the underlying code in Linux was a line for line copy of Unix. The Yahoo people are saying the same thing. One of the engineers at Xfire was a former engineer at Yahoo, and the claim is that he took trade secrets from one company to another. (The guy worked on Yahoo's instant messenger software.)

What makes no sense to me is that the people at Xfire have offered to sit down with the co-founders of Yahoo and allow them to go through the code, line by line, to prove that there is no copyright infringement.

But, code is code? How can a technique be copyrighted? Easily. WinZip uses copyrighted techniques for compression. The are other techniques to accomplish the same thing (WinRAR, StuffIt on a Mac), but they are all getting to the same conclusion using different methods. Yahoo is saying Xfire uses the same patented method of getting game information that is used in Yahoo's GameProwler (which does about the same thing as Xfire, but is integrated into Yahoo Messenger).

I'll be interviewing Mike (the CEO of Xfire) today and I'll get all the dirt. You may also notice that the "Letter of the Day" on Xfire's website comes from a *cough* familiar source. :P

~Czech

[=DBA=Ronin]

Kevin...i dont see shit on xfires site about Letter of the Day...where is it?

[BuddhaMan]

The zip algorithm is open source now.

[Czechmate]

The letter is at:

http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?name=XFire&file=cmspage&body=xf_lawsuit_letter

As for ZIP being opensource, I was using it as an example that everyone would know about. A different example is Google's searching algorithm.

~Czech