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 |  Subject: Next, please: Yet another patent infringement suit against Nintendo  Sat Aug 23, 2008 10:25 pm | |
| Chicago (IL) – Rockville, Maryland-based Hillcrest Laboratories has filed a patent infringement suit against Nintendo and its Wiimote controller. What makes this suit especially interesting is the fact that the patent at the core of this suit was filed seven months after the Wii was introduced and legal action was filed one day after this patent was confirmed.
There are patent infringement suits that, under a common sense impression outside legal office, make perfect sense. Take, for example, Immersion’s suit against Sony and its vibration feature in its Dualshock controllers. Immersion had worked on this technology for a long time and it just appeared natural that it would protect the core of the technology the company’s future relies on.
But then there are suits that just leave you scratching your head. While Nintendo already had to pay $21 million earlier this in a patent suit that involved its Wii Classic controller, this time it is the Wiimote that is in question and attacked by Hillcrest, which claims that it has the patent rights to “three-dimensional pointing devices and techniques for tilt compensation and improved usability associated therewith.”
Could it really be possible that Nintendo came to market with a controller, for which it did not have sufficient technology licenses?
It turns out that Hillcrest believes that Nintendo infringes four of its patents (7,158,118, 7,262,760, and 7,414,611, which relate to a handheld three-dimensional pointing device, 7,139,983, which relates to a navigation interface display system that graphically organizes content for display on a television)
Only two of Hillcrest’s patent’s however, were filed before the release of the Nintendo Wii on November 19, 2006 – number 7,139,983 (April 9, 2001: “Interactive content guide for television programming”), which seems to be rather minor in this case and 7,158,118 (May 2, 2005). However the latter seems to have been effectively replaced with patent 7,262,760 (filed December 18, 2006) which carries the same title (“3D pointing devices with orientation compensation and improved usability”), but interestingly adds one major claim to the patent – “an accelerometer for detecting acceleration of said handheld device.”
If we exclude the patent covering the interactive content guide, that leaves two patents aiming exactly for the Wiimote functionality and both patents were filed by Hillcrest after the release of the Wii. Patent 7,262,760 was filed on December 18, 2006 (approved on August 28, 2007) and patent 7,414,611 (which also carries the title “3D pointing devices with orientation compensation and improved usability” and enhances the previous version) was filed on June 20, 2007 (approved August 19, 2008).
This leaves us with the impression that unless Nintendo infringes on the initial patent filed in 2005 and 2001, there are at least questions about Hillcrest’s claims. We are wondering, however, why Hillcrest waited to file the suit until the most recent version of its “3D pointing devices with orientation compensation and improved usability” patent was approved. This patent adds multiple claims to the preceding version, claiming, for example, a “processing” capability for the “transformation of detected rotational motion of said hand held device.” To us, it just looks a bit strange that the legal action was filed only one day after this patent was listed as approved by the USPTO.
We aren’t lawyers, but Hillcrest’s claims appear to be sitting on thin ice, at least if Nintendo isn’t infringing on the two patents that were filed before the release of the Wii - and if the company did not simply forget to patent its Wii system properly.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39023/118/ |
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