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.

Comments

Is anyone surprised?

[renegadesx]

Another day, another patent troll gets millions for abusing the patent system.

Re:Is anyone surprised?

[Anonymous Coward]

iLife appears to be the actual inventor of the patented technology, not someone who acquired the patent second-hand purely for the purposes of suing people, so I would argue that they are not patent trolls as the term is normally used. Without actually reading the patent, I wouldn't like to comment on whether there is any substance to the patent itself, but not every patent infringement lawsuit can be considered patent trolling.