https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp113
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp113
A Texas jury found last week that the Wii Remote used with Nintendo's Wii and Wii U consoles infringed a patent owned by iLife Technologies. While the $10 Million dollar verdict will certainly be fought further in summary judgement and appeals courts, and thus is not a final decision, it is a significant potential blow for one of our favorite game companies.
In patent world, inventions can be claimed broadly sometimes so as to cover future uses and expansions of those technologies. That is precisely what happened here.
iLife Technologies developed motion-sensing accelerometer technologies to advance their commercial products, which both monitor infants to help prevent sudden infant death syndrome, and monitor elderly adults for falls that require medical attention. iLife obtained 6 U.S. patents on innovations in this field which were then used as the basis of this lawsuit. Nintendo challenged the validity of all these patents in post grant review proceedings, and that knocked out all but one of the patents, which is what Nintendo has now been deemed to infringe.
U.S. Patent No. 6,864,796 is that patent, and it covers a system within a communications device and method of evaluating movement of a body relative to the surrounding environment. The broadest system claim requires only a sensor associable with the body, a processor that processes dynamic and static accelerative phenomena detected by the sensor to determine whether a body movement is within an environmental tolerance, and communicating tolerance indicia to an outside device in response to the determination.
Claim language is a special kind of legalese, so what does that claim mean, in English? In short, it covers any system that senses movements using accelerometers and then determines and communicates whether those movements are large enough to indicate a specific type of movement beyond just environmental noise. In other words, what a Wii Remote does when it detects intentional movements and communicates them to a console to interact with video game software.
When the claims were interpreted and construed during the lawsuit, the broad ordinary meanings of these terms were adopted by the court, rather than Nintendo's attempts to read the claims more narrowly onto fall detection devices only. Certainly the narrower patent claims on the detected movements being body falls and the like are not what Nintendo Wii systems do, but those broader claims are written to cover things like Wii Remotes, even though that's outside iLife's normal commercial products and markets. And if you can prove novelty and non-obviousness over prior art inventions for the broad invention, the patent will cover future devices like how the Wii Remote is likely covered here.
With Nintendo losing on claim interpretation, the most likely path to reversing the verdict would be to show clear error in that interpretation, or show that the patent is invalid and should not have been granted. As the '796 Patent has already survived post grant review, the chances look grim for Nintendo to avoid this verdict.
The Bottom Line is, in technology fields it is difficult to beat everyone to the patent office to file on innovative ideas, especially in view of the ability to broadly claim. By filing early and often with good patent counsel, iLife Technologies can protect their own life saving devices from knockoffs, but also create revenue streams from other companies who use the same technology in their own fields. Needless to say, a $10 Million dollar verdict would pay off that investment and then some. It's also why clearance searching for new products is so vital to avoid mistakes like this, which Nintendo can probably afford but others may not be able to afford.
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