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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."
When you pry it from my cold, dead hands...
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.
Nintendo Co. Ltd. (Nintendo) has been accused of infringing/and or still infringing on the patents listed:
Patent # Title
6,222,525 "Image controllers with sheet connected sensors"
6,344,791 "Variable sensor with tactile feedback"
6,351,205 "Variable-conductance sensor"
6,563,415 "Analog sensor(s) with snap-through tactile feedback"
6,906,700 "3D controller with vibration"
What could the Classic/GCN controllers violate that the Nunchuk doesn't? Probably the analog triggers that *click* when pushed down all the way. "Analog sensor(s) with snap-through tactile feedback" seems an accurate description.
posting AC because I modded down trolls.
I'll give you a hint: Anascape sued Sony and Microsoft for the same thing, but they settled out of court.
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.
Here is one way to fix the problem: let the Patent Office be heavily penalized for every patent overturned by the courts. If the Office goes bankrupt as a result of its own negligence, too bad, let it die. Congress can always start a new Office with completely different management.
At the moment, the Patent Office is too unaccountable; there is little penalty for doing shoddy work. The threat of bankruptcy might concentrate a few minds over there.
I wonder if part of those settlements was to sue nintendo to bankrupcy.
6,563,415 "Analog sensor(s) with snap-through tactile feedback" - This one is invalid through prior art, i.e. atari 2600 joysticks had snap-through tactile feedback.
6,351,205 "Variable-conductance sensor" - This is the stupidest fucking patent, this is just a potentiometer. The patent office is really shining in the stupidity here.
6,344,791 "Variable sensor with tactile feedback" - another stupid ass patent with prior art going back to the 80's. i.e. race steering wheels used in arcade games like pole position.
Maybe I can get a patent for dumb ass patent troll...
6,245,892 "dumb ass patent troll" - Hey I'm going to start sueing!!!
This is a bit of a pedantic response, but "prior art" means something different. Prior art is evidence of the patented invention, or something substantially similar, having already been invented by someone else, earlier than the patent holder's earliest evidence of invention. Prior art usually invalidates a patent, since only the first inventor can patent something.
What you're asking about is the case of someone sitting on a patent for a while, not enforcing it despite being aware of the violation, and then enforcing it later. There is no automatic statutory ban on this, unlike with trademarks, where you can lose the trademark after a period of not enforcing it. There is a general legal doctrine of "estoppel", which prohibits you from inducing someone else into doing something and then suing them; for example, if you told someone you forgave their debt (even if you didn't legally sign documents to discharge the debt), and they relied on your statement to that effect and bought a house, and now you want the money back and they don't have it because they bought a house with it, they could invoke estoppel since you misled them to their detriment about the status of the debt. In cases like this it's a bit harder to invoke---it's not like the patent trolls actively say "hey anyone can use our patent!" and then later "ha ha just kidding, see you in court!" Instead, they keep quiet for a while, and then sue later, so you'd have to argue their silence was acquiescing to or encouraging the use implicitly, and that it was done intentionally for the purpose of getting the defendant to rely on the patented technology before suing. This has worked on occasion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Actually, E.D.Tex is so popular with patent infringement plaintiffs because it hands down victory after victory for plaintiffs on questionable procedural rulings and blatant plaintiff favoritism. Why? Sit down, its story time.
Once upon a time, a certain area of Texas was popular for tort plaintiffs because it frequently produced enormous damage awards, thus providing employment and tourism revenue for an otherwise inconsequential part of the United States. Then, a series of tort reform laws were passed to curtail the activities of the offending courts. So, in search of a new means of corrupting the judicial system to keep a constant flow of legal tourism through Mayberry, a judge from Marshall, Texas decided to publish a paper on patent rules.
Having a judge who understands patent law is an excellent proposition, except when the judge intends to contort the law to draw business into his remote domain and benefit his local associates.
Who decides where a case is brought when the defendant (say, a national corporation) is subject to personal jurisdiction throughout the entire country? The plaintiff. How do you persuade patent plaintiffs to bring lawsuits in your backwards town? By handing out numerous favorable decisions and large damage awards.
And so, E.D.Tex and Marshall, TX are the bane of patent defense attorneys throughout the United States, and patents of doubtful validity regularly receive the imprimatur of a federal district court.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit doesn't agree to hear appeals for every case, nor should it. That would be impossible.
In conclusion, we should never have let Texas into the Union in the first place.
This is exciting. Brad Armstrong is my good friend Alex's uncle. I actually met him two months ago at a graduation. Brad is a very friendly and interesting guy. Alex says he's been an inventor most of his life and has been screwed out of a lot of patients. He invented the joystick sensitivity function found in Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft controllers. He recently won a lawsuit against the two latter corporations, and now he finally won the third. Interesting... he's now rich, but not as rich as Nintendo.
my GameCube controllers are very jiggly and have huge nullzones.
I dated a girl once who fit that description.
Table-ized A.I.
Nintendo used an interesting strategy. They basically conceded that the Gamecube controllers and Wii Classic controller infringed, and concentrated on making sure that only those would be found to infringe. The Wii remote was also accused, and their goal was to keep that from being found to infringe.
Judge Clark commented on this when denying Nintendo's motion for remittitur:
What people here don't understand is that you have to read the claims of a patent to know what mechanism really is patented. The claims describe a minimum set of properties that a device should have in order to be covered by the patent. For example:
6,563,415 "Analog sensor(s) with snap-through tactile feedback" - in essence, it is about a button that does 'click' when you press it AND has analog readout. For prior art, you need a combination of these two properties integrated into a single device. The fact that there have been analog joysticks with a clicky button forever is not relevant. In addition there are some technical details on how the click is produced and how the analog reading is done. Make a pressure sensitive button with a capacitive pressure sensor instead of a conductance sensor and it is not covered by this patent.
6,351,205 "Variable-conductance sensor" - this is a variation of the previous one with two click points during pressing the button.
3D controller with vibration - if you read the claim, this seems to be a very complex device with several buttons attached in a specific way combined with potentiometers. The patent was filed in 2000. An Nintendo engineer who knew about this patent could probably have designed around it if he wanted to.
So I don't think the patents are covered by prior art in this case. There is another requirement for a patent, and that is whether the invention is obvious to someone skilled in the art. That is much more fuzzy. In general, if the patent is a new combination of three or more existing inventions, it is non-obvious. If it is only two existing inventions combined, then it depends. I'm not into game controllers, so I can't judge that here.
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