Nintendo is known for making Mario games and designing cute pocket monsters.
A patent troll company called UltimatePointer, LLC claimed that Nintendo’s motion-controlled Wii hardware infringed on its patents. The patent numbers are 8,049,729 and 7,746,321. These kinds of suits are common in any industry dealing with cutting-edge hardware design as we saw earlier, and Nintendo has a long history of defending itself in high-profile patent cases while also aggressively using the legal system to protect its properties.
On March 1, 2016, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals found that Nintendo’s Wii console does not infringe patents asserted by UltimatePointer, LLC. Furthermore, the court determined that UltimatePointer must pay some of Nintendo’s attorney fees. This is because claimant could not prove that it had done the proper investigation into Nintendo’s tech before bringing a lawsuit, which the court considers a waste of its time. I will discuss one claim from one of the patents in question:
Patent Number: 8,049,729
Short summary: Provides a method for controlling movement of a computer display cursor based on a point-of-aim of a pointing device within an interaction region (relating to motion-controlled hardware).
Claim: An apparatus for controlling a feature on a computer generated image, the apparatus comprising a handheld device including an image sensor. This sensor will generate data related to the distance between a first point and second point; the first point having a predetermined relation to the computer generated image and the second point having a predetermined relation to a handheld enclosure.
On reading this claim, I instantly imagined the Wii controller/PlayStation Move controller. It is easy to understand technical jargon when you can correlate it with something you have experienced, and if you haven't, then it becomes too abstract to understand. However, just because it sounds like something on the surface doesn't mean that it is exactly that, as we saw in this case. The patent troll was quick to act (without proper research) in the hope of taking advantage of Nintendo financially, but I am glad that it lost.
A win against the patent troll, hurray!
Hi Srushti, thanks for the interesting post! I like how you selected a case in which a troll lost. Also, I looked into this case and it wasn't filed in Texas! It was actually filed in Seattle. Apparently the total litigation fees that the troll had to end up paying added up to $33,412.75, which seems insignificant compared to the $7,406,362.99 that UltimatePointer asked for, but it still seems like a form of justice. I wonder if having to pay the dependent's legal fees actually has a deterrent effect on patent trolls though.
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