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Comment by DisposaBoy | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or has everyone else seemingly not read either the title nor the post?

Rationale:

Most people seem to be talking about this game already does this or that and xxx is virtual money blah blah. From my understanding the patent is for virtual currency in gambling games which almost no-one seems to have noticed. I mean, don't get me wrong I'm sure there is a lot of prior art for this patent but it just strikes me as strange that so many people would bring up seemingly irrelevant arguments.

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I don't know much about patents, but let's say Farmville (although Zynga own it, assume they don't) decided to add some sort of betting element to their game, would that not make it a "gambling game" and therefore infringe on any patents against it?

While it might not affect all pre-existing social games, if the above is true then it limits what they can do with their game.

I'm not sure how your first point applies here. If I get a patent for copy-paste using gestures, does my patent apply to using a mouse or any future copy-paste methods? Maybe, maybe not, it doesn't actually matter here because those methods don't exist yet so talking about them is irrelevant as I tried to point out. If you read the whole of my comment you'd see that I went as far as to suggest the patent itself is most likely invalid.

No, my prior art was specifically related to gambling games. I explored doing this as a facebook app somewhat seriously, but then Facebook and Zynga had the dispute that ended with FB credits being the broad facebook currency and figured it wouldn't be allowed on FB/was too uncertain.

Why is using virtual currency in gambling games patent-worthy if the unrestricted use of virtual currency already exists?

I'm not sure what you're getting at as I didn't say anything about the patent being valid. All I did was call out the fact that most people weren't talking about the actual patent. Oracle has some patents related to virtual machines, are they enforcible on all virtual machines?

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