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Nintendo Served With Motion Control Patent Lawsuit
by Blake Ellison, Nov 12, 2008 5:00pm PSTNintendo, which has been hit with a plethora of patent lawsuits in the last few years, has been served another: a "small Ohio technology company" called Motiva has filed a patent infringement suit against Nintendo for its motion-sensing Wii Remote.
"Motiva is not a patent troll," said Chris Banys from Lanier Law Firm in response to gamers calling out Motiva for filing intentionally vague patents then suing companies that use technologies resembling those patents. Motiva "worked hard" to secure its patent, claimed Banys in an interview given to Edge.
"Big companies don't like to be sued. They also don't like to pay small inventors when a small inventor actually has invented something," the firm representative asserted.
Banys continued to characterize Motiva as the rugged underdog. "Big companies would rather go out there without doing the right thing. They'd rather not buy the license, make a lot of money, and leave the person that actually invented the thing out in the cold."
"Nintendo I'm sure will have good lawyers who have interesting stories to tell of their own," added Banys.
Back in May, Nintendo got served by losing a controller-related patent lawsuit to a company known as Anascape. Nintendo was ordered to pay $21 million in damages, but the suit was connected to analog sticks and buttons, not motion-sensing.
In conclusion, Banys is offered the last word: "A 'patent troll' is sort of a loosely-defined term, but I would say the most common use of the term 'patent troll' is to describe a small inventor who invents something and sues a big company."
Comments
THAT is trolling. Judge should tell these small companies to frag off unless they have a working product PRIOR to the release of the item in question. If Nintendo didn't go ahead with the WiiMote what would this unknown company have done? Absofreakinlutley nothing, and they never would have done anything. Life lesson learned, it's better to wait until someone else gets rich and sue them than it is to grow some guts and step out yourself.
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I guess they needed all that time to craft some nifty ways of "proof".
We had a shit loads of trouble patenting some stuff as it was to similar to a patent a Swiss pharma company already patented, which when read, was not even a bit similar in the long-run, but It took 3 years of rewriting and sending forth and back, until they finally decided that it isn't "too similar" anymore and gave the OK, but we still have a mark/disclaimer on the papers that there are parts from the other patent from the Swiss corp.
Really don't get the US stuff, seem like they just take whatever they get and just file it and give an OK.
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