PalTalk Heads to the Federal Circuit
PalTalk Holdings Inc. v. Riot Games Inc. et al.
United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
Case Nos.: 19-2035, 19-2036, 19-2037, and 19-2038
Filed June 17, 2019
Video game chat company PalTalk Holdings Inc. (“PalTalk”) has appealed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) ruling to the Federal Circuit. The PTAB’s ruling invalidated two PalTalk patents, 5,822,523 (the “’523 Patent”) and 6,226,686 (the “’686 Patent”), as being obvious over prior art references including WO 94/11814 to Aldred et al. (“Aldred”). This PTAB ruling is related to a lawsuit that PalTalk filed against video game developers Riot Games and Valve Corp. relating to Riot Games’ League of Legends game and Valve’s Dota 2.
The ’523 and ’686 Patents relate to in-game messaging as applied to video games. In the PTAB’s ruling, the PTAB rejected PalTalk’s argument that the ’523 Patent requires a “player’s computer to send a message to the server to create, join, or leave a group” and that Aldred did not render obvious the ’523 or ’686 Patents because Aldred did not require the sending of requests to a server. PalTalk has appealed the PTAB’s rulings as to both the ’523 and ’686 Patents.
Earlier suits instituted by PalTalk alleged infringement of these two patents by Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. and Activision Blizzard Inc. Both of those earlier suits were resolved when the companies agreed to license the infringed patents from PalTalk.
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