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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.
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?
Having skimmed the patent, it's basically bullshit.
It is simply describing a possibly wireless device with an accelerometer, running some program.
This is, in 1999, exactly as any engineer would design a fall detection thing. It adds nothing to the knowledge of mankind, and in no way deserves protection.
It should not have passed the novelty test.
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.