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Jury Finds Nintendo Wii Infringes Dallas Inventor's Patent, Awards $10 Million (arstechnica.com)
A jury has ruled that Nintendo must pay $10.1 million because its Wii and Wii U systems infringe a patent belonging to a Dallas medical motion-detection company. Ars Technica reports: iLife sued Nintendo (PDF) in 2013 after filing lawsuits against four other companies in 2012. The case went to a jury trial in Dallas, and yesterday the jury returned its verdict (PDF). They found that Nintendo infringed U.S. Patent No. 6,864,796, first filed in 1999, which describes "systems and methods for evaluating movement of a body relative to an environment." The patent drawings show a body-mounted motion detector that could detect falls in the elderly, which is the market that iLife was targeting, according to its now defunct website. The $10.1 million was less than 10 percent of what iLife's attorneys had been asking for. When the trial began in Dallas on August 21, Law360 reported that iLife lawyers asked the jury for a $144 million payout. That damage demand was based on a royalty of $4 per Wii unit, multiplied by 36 million systems sold in the six years before the lawsuit was filed.
Another day, another patent troll gets millions for abusing the patent system.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Sad story.
Not even a fig leaf to make it look like it claims it taught something useful.
From the patent... : '3. The system as claimed in claim 1 wherein said communications device comprises one of: a hand held computer, a laptop computer and a wireless Internet access device.'
Have laptops not been detecting falling situations from far before this came along?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Is iLife a patent troll: no they actually made a product and released it using the patent.
Is the patent valid? Well according to this judge and jury yes, according to most of us probably not. The patent covers using a 3-axis accelerometer and some sort of data processing to detect motion of a body. Well in physics a body is any cohesive group of matter that moves, for example the earth is a planetary body. The V2 missile in WW2 used 2 gyros and an accelerometer in its inertial navigation system, I wonder how many missiles since? More recently the year before filing date on the patent the Amida Simputer was commercialy released in India, a handheld Linux based computer with an accelerometer based gesture interface. Even if these were not using a 3-axis accelerometer is using a 3-axis accelerometer instead of a 1 axis of 2 axis or multiple accelerometers a novel application?
Nobody had patented it in the context of detecting falls by the elderly. In 1998, accellerometers were expensive.
An inertial navigation system (INS) is a navigation aid that uses a computer, motion sensors (accelerometers) and rotation sensors (gyroscopes) to continuously calculate via dead reckoning the position, orientation, and velocity (direction and speed of movement) of a moving object without the need for external references.
Using that in the context of detecting someone falling is hardly innovative; but even if it is that wouldn't matter because that's not what the Wii does.
Read the patent, its a sensor they didn't invent, connected to a processor they didn't invent, attached to a body to detect falls.
The people who did invent the sensor, had some of their value stolen by this company because this company patented one of the uses of their motion sensor (detecting people falling). The jury here, widens that to cover more general body movements during games, i.e. increases the amount of theft of IP that this company did.
This is a troll that stole some of the functional uses for the motion sensor invention.
If a company invents a flying car, and cannot sell it because a troll has patented "flying car used to go to work, flying car used to go to school, flying car used to go shopping", that's true *theft* of IP there. It denies the true inventor the right to profit from their invention.
I haven't read it in detail, but isn't the patent essentially a motion sensor of the most basic and common kind found in every modern smartphone?
Isn't their entire Fall Detection product something which a half-arsed app can do better? Considering it's easy to find plenty of fall detector apps, I guess it is.
IANAL, but isn't that laches by about 5.5 years?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Have laptops not been detecting falling situations from far before this came along?
The earliest reference I can find to hard drive fall sensors had IBM shipping them around 2032, so four years after this patent.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Land, Labor, Capital and Enterprise. These are the [only] elements of a successful business, which adds values, provides employment, gives purpose and generates profit.
You rent a stage, you hire some actors/actresses, costume designers and a director. Without a concept for the play, or the script for the play (eg. script for reality TV shows is generated on the fly) the audience will have nothing to watch and your business will be worthless. You know how sucky and repetitive reality TV can be, and that's because it does not have a proper script.
Even the simplest business usually has a some IP called business/trade secrets without which they would go out of business. Only stupid plebes like you labor without knowledge or strategy. The business world runs on ideas and secrets (IP essentially).
Looking at this patent"drawings show a body-mounted motion detector that could detect falls" and recent international judgements, I see a trend in judges awarding/favouring us companies. And Chinese courts seems to retaliate in similarly.
If that were the limit of it Nintendo would be fine.
A grammatical error in post making fun of a spelling mistake.... /. has it all. I used to come for the insightful comments, today, I come for the inciteful ones.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Have laptops not been detecting falling situations from far before this came along?
The earliest reference I can find to hard drive fall sensors had IBM shipping them around 2032, so four years after this patent.
And 15 years after now?
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Time to pay up, plumber!
Ware, C., & Jessome, D. R. (1988). Using the bat: a six
dimensional mouse for object placement. IEEE Computer
Graphics & Animation, 8, 65-70.
Sigh.
Patent != copyright.
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Enough already. Comments pointing out any of these things should automatically be marked down as off-topic unless the article is about spelling or grammatical errors. Freaking annoying, just understand the context and move on.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You successfully identified the joke. *golfclap*
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If this particular patent includes a wiimote, couldn't it pretty much apply to any application of an accelerometer in any smartphone made henceforth? What made the wiimote different than a phone with regards to this patent?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Cell phones typically don't use the accelerometer to determine if a person is {...} moving fast.
Please try to explain that to all the people who install podometer-like(*) apps on their smartphones and then feel obligated to post about how much steps(**) they've done in a day, or where and how long they have jogged.
Now that the wii suit has been won, I think all the accelerometers-using apps are next.
(And probably they could twist at least some smartwatches manufacturer into it too, for similar reasons)
--- /.-geek, I would presume "walking" *is* "moving fast"
(*) - Yes some app rely on actual separate devices talking over some wireless signal. Other work (less reliably) using only the accelerometers.
(**) - on the scale of an average
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
No NDA no contracts at all, no copyrights, no secrecy and all? No, you deliberately leapt from patents to licenses ONLY to proclaim GPL should be removed.
Go ahead, remove the GPL. Without a license, you don't get to use the code, so it is only used until someone with a claim to the code says you can't. then you're fucked. They don't even need a reason or to do it for everyone.
Clearly you were bitchslapped by a FOSS proponent before and you've never gotten over it.
The patent in question seems to describe a "new use" for existing technology. Assuming that there is no prior art describing this new use, then it's quite possibly a perfectly valid patent. However, wii remote controls are used for gaming, not for determining when an elderly person has fallen (unless there is an old person falling game out there ...a horrifying thought to be sure). The provided and rather abbreviated description of Nintendo's defense appears to be exactly this. I'd go with Nintendo. I can't see how they lost this case.
Yes, very expensive. It was $15 part instead of a $0.50 part. Simply no one would have ever thought of using something so rare and so expensive.
Eat that!
These dumb patents have convinced me to leave the computer science field. I plan to go to law school after I finish my undergrad.
Software patents are very very very harmful... Why has congress not gotten rid of them yet? We need to organize a better lobbying group. Write a proposed amendment and submit it to relevant politicians...
Soo HW manufacturers will be sued next?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4wdloop
why only go after WII? why not cellphone makers, they have the accelerometer and processor too. why not any motion capture tech like the xbox kinect? why stop at the wii?
https://hackaday.com/2011/07/14/did-microsoft-steal-the-kinect/
As always, read the entire article.
The lawsuit is bullshit, the company never sold any product with the patented tech, and it wasn't anything but a design composed of components iLife did not develop. It's a patent troll through and through.
Nintendo is also appealing the decision, so this isn't final.
They are super special made of unicorn horns and fairy dust, not less than 1 billion per patent.
That seems a bit high for in incremental advance in technology. Such an advance would occur sooner or later. Maybe that's why they were paid a lowly $0.28 per Wii unit.
I don't buy that they invented the chips.
or even the obvious idea of using said accelerator sensors for detecting free fall or falling over. I mean goddamn those are like the reference examples for said chips and so obvious it's not even funny.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Uh, I meant 2002. Apparently typing is too hard.
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Please mash the keyboard to order your typing wand.
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Actually, that's just an example:
For example, when a communications device detects a body movement that signifies the occurrence of a potentially dangerous event (e.g., a fall), the communication device can immediately send an alarm to call for assistance.
The patent is actually about detecting and evaluating movement relative to environment, instead of detecting it. They open by describing systems which detect static acceleration (tilt), dynamic acceleration (movement), or even reason about those (fall detection), and lead into suggesting:
It would be very useful to have a communications device that is capable of evaluating movement of a body relative to an environment.
That's a Wiimote.
So the patent is about what they say it's about; whether it's valid is another matter. We're at least not saying we've described a way to detect when something has suddenly fallen (suddenly accelerated, then suddenly decelerated) and extrapolating that to a system to detect complex changes in spatial position or orientation so as to describe relative movement in space.
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