Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Loses Controller Patent Lawsuit
kryogen1x alerts us to coverage at 1up indicating that Nintendo controller may soon become scarce — Nintendo lost in court to Anascape over analog sticks in their Wii and GameCube controllers.This isn't the first time the big manufacturers have been targeted in lawsuits involving features in their controllers. From the article: "The lawsuit concerns the analog sticks in the Classic Controller and GameCube controllers, which Texas-based Anascape Ltd. claims to hold a patent on that Nintendo violated. The court has ruled in favor of Anascape, and US District Judge Ron Clark has rejected Nintendo's request for a new trial. As a result, Clark said he will put a ban on the sale of the controllers (which includes sales of GameCube systems) starting tomorrow, July 23, unless Nintendo posts a bond or puts royalties into an escrow account."
The.
FUCK.
Hard to say who to root for, if anyone.
How about basing your decision on the merit of the case rather than which side you "like" more?
In any case, the patent is almost certainly overbroad and/or obvious and never should have been issued, and they were only sued in the court that they were because it is notoriously biased in favor of patent trolls.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
DOesn't prior art have some bearing on this? I mean, the gamecub controllers have been around for how many years now? And Anascape waits until how long ago to file suit? Can they still defend a patent after this long or am I missing something? Something definitely smells fishy here.
Apparently the big corportations are not hurt enough to change their attitudes towards patents. May more ridiculous patent suits appear, and clear everybody's eyes that patents are sucking and they are obstacles to (rather than protection of) innovation.
What a coincidence, headquartered only a short drive away from Patent Troll Central, a.k.a., the US District Court, Eastern District of Texas.
"are popular with plaintiffs because they provide the plaintiff with a predictable litigation timetable"
And because the Eastern District of Texas is famous for making sure the plaintiff wins most of the time.
Hah... Tell that to MadCatz, or Game Infinity, or Pelican Accessories and others. They seem to be doing quite well at making alternative controllers. (With analogue sticks!)
... do the actions of a few motivated individuals become "intellectual terrorism?" Excuse the hyperbole, but every time a patent lawsuit is filed, a lot of people are harmed. How long will we allow this to go on?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
How the heck would they get "Variable conductance sensor" ? Pot's in game controllers are certainly older than 10 years.
My memory is quite foggy on this point, but didn't nintendo use patents on their cartridge design to keep 3rd parties from making unauthorized games for the original NES or something? If so, then this seems to be a bit of USPTO karma.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
did the inventor produce working samples?
did the inventor ever attempt to manufacture or license his new idea?
or did he think of ways of joining existing technologies together, patent it, and wait for some poor schlepp to try _actually_ doing it?
thus, the cries of 'patent troll' appear to be in order here.
yes, the fort knox of gaming accessories--the wii strap.
http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/did-wii-break-your-tv-/494785
He invented the joystick sensitivity function found in Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft controllers
Did he? Or did engineers from those three corporations also decide to implement something obvious but not bother to patent their "inventions" first?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm really starting to get pissed off. Corporate America is infringing on freedoms more and more, but in insidious ways.
Challenging free speech with law suits.
Challenging freedom of "fair use" with lobbyists who write laws and get them passed.
The patent system affects our freedom of expression.
If these were invading armies, we'd get our guns and defend ourselves. With internationalization, private entities are acting more like governments with no democratic feedback.
I tell you, "patent trolls" wouldn't dare file stupid law suits if we stormed their offices and took the corporate officers as POWs.
I know this is hyperbole, but I'm also kind of serious, we need to start fighting these extra-legal entities who abuse our laws and have no personal legal responsibility.
Nintendo should post a countersuit in the united nations as this would seen a human rights issue.
A company does not have human rights. Try again.
I've seen private inventors being run over by big business, who has a tendency to totally ignore patents that isn't owned by themselves
The sad part is that if Big N is like many other tech companies, they are literally ignoring patents in the sense that they explicitly tell their engineers not to do patent searches or otherwise try to figure out if any of the things they create in the course of doing their jobs are covered by a patent.
If patents were land mines, and technology were a country, it would be Afghanistan. Or maybe the Korean DMZ. There's so many patents that it's next to impossible not to violate at least one in any non-trivial piece of technology. Even if you do a patent search, you aren't guaranteed to find every potentially applicable patent, nor be able to sort out which do and don't apply in precisely the same way a hypothetical judge would. Yet if you are aware of the existence of a potentially applicable patent, and are found to be in violation, then that's treble damages. Even just doing the search to begin with could imply that you knew of the patent and knowingly violated it.
Thus, they ignore the patents, and hope for the best. When they violate another tech company's patent, then hopefully their own pile of patents gives them leverage. If it's a small inventor, they can either settle or hope the inventor can't afford the legal battle. If it's a patent troll, then they're basically screwed.
I don't know about this case in detail, but it certainly seems plausible to me that Nintendo engineers, deliberately ignorant of any patents and given the concept for a controller with analog triggers that "click" when fully depressed, came up with an invention very similar to the one in the patent.
Private inventors certainly get screwed by this setup. The big tech companies whose engineers are actually making things get screwed too. The system is broken. The only people it is working for are people who do nothing but buy up other peoples' patents, and then sue other companies for violating them, never inventing nor creating anything themselves except obstacles to progress. This is the opposite of the intention of the patent system. It's broken.
The enemies of Democracy are
Comment removed based on user account deletion