Patents by Inventor Michael R. Courage

Michael R. Courage has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 8566386
    Abstract: Systems, methods, and computer readable media are disclosed for aggregating event records obtained from a plurality of videogame consoles, and generating event objects for each event record of the plurality. Additionally, the event objects can be stored in a database that is exposed to a third party via a connection to a network such as the Internet. In addition to the foregoing, other aspects are described in the claims, drawings, and text forming a part of the present disclosure.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 2, 2007
    Date of Patent: October 22, 2013
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Michael R. Courage, Jerry A. Johnson, Brendan K. Reville
  • Patent number: 7584154
    Abstract: Official results for an online game session are determined by an arbitration server based upon reports received from each game console participating in the game session. The reports provide results for all of the players participating in the games session. Before starting the game session, each game console registers the players using it with the gaming service, so that a player who disconnects mid-game can be identified. If the results reported differ, predefined arbitration rules are applied to determine the official results. If a game console cannot report because it is being packet bombed, a different protocol is used to transmit a data packet to the arbitration service indicating that the gaming console is being packet bombed. While not required, the arbitration server can use historical data recorded for each player to apply the predefined arbitration rules in determining the official results.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 28, 2004
    Date of Patent: September 1, 2009
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Ling Tony Chen, Michael R. Courage, Michal Bortnik
  • Publication number: 20090210493
    Abstract: Various aspects are disclosed herein for communicating and displaying of hyperlinks in a computing community. Hyperlinks can be communicated by being embedded in messages, such that users of a closed computing community can send and receive such hyperlinks. These hyperlinks can link to hyperlinked content that can be stored on a central computing device responsible for administering the community. Moreover, any content that is associated with hyperlinks, whether that content is in the form of blogs, RSS feeds, and so on, can be made publicly available while any associated hyperlinks will be visible only to a subset of computing devices, namely, the community computing devices (but not to any general computing devices accessing the content). This task may be accomplished by using predetermined and/or proprietary schema properly understood only by the community computing devices.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 15, 2008
    Publication date: August 20, 2009
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Jerry A. Johnson, Jeffrey S. Stone, Christian R. Lehew, Michael R. Courage, Brendan K. Reville, Linus Lee, Chandler J. Holbrook
  • Publication number: 20090143145
    Abstract: Redirection of physical media interaction is disclosed. For instance, a read action can be redirected from an optical disc to a secure virtualization module that virtualizes optical discs. The module can take digital packages in one format and present them to optical disc drivers configured to read the content of such packages in a different format. Thus, the module allows for online media content to remain in its native format while being accessible to existing native gaming console resources configured to read content in a different format. In other aspects, the module can perform various security checks on the packages, including hashing the fragments of packages, where such fragments can contain licensing provisions that can be examined by the module. The module itself can be downloaded and installed onto a gaming system or it can be pre-in stalled.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 3, 2007
    Publication date: June 4, 2009
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Paul J. Lukinich, Paul S. Hellyar, Michael R. Courage, Jerry Hook, Tracy Sharpe
  • Publication number: 20090088254
    Abstract: Systems, methods, and computer readable media are disclosed for aggregating event records obtained from a plurality of videogame consoles, and generating event objects for each event record of the plurality. Additionally, the event objects can be stored in a database that is exposed to a third party via a connection to a network such as the Internet. In addition to the foregoing, other aspects are described in the claims, drawings, and text forming a part of the present disclosure.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 2, 2007
    Publication date: April 2, 2009
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Michael R. Courage, Jerry A. Johnson, Brendan K. Reville
  • Patent number: 7367888
    Abstract: A trust rating factor (TRF) based upon data collected for players participating in previous online games sessions is used in determining official results for an online game session when different results are reported by the participants. Counters corresponding to each of a plurality of parameters related to conditions that arise during or at the end of a game session are employed in determining the TRF for each player. For example, if one of the players may have experienced a packet bombing that interrupted normal data communication, a counter related to that condition will be incremented for all players in the game session. If all of the players report results that are consistent at the end of the game session, the TRF of each player is improved. A separate TRF is determined for each game title in which a player participates.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 28, 2004
    Date of Patent: May 6, 2008
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Ling Tony Chen, Michael R. Courage, Michal Bortnik