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Nintendo waggles out of Wii patent lawsuit
Fenner Investments Ltd filed suit against all of the current games console manufacturers a while back, aimed at each console's supposed infringement on its patent for "a low-voltage joystick port interface." Nintendo's case was dismissed by Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court in Tyler, Texas on Monday. Nintendo, as you can imagine, was quite pleased, with the company's senior VP and legal counsel, Rick Flamm, on-hand for the verdict. "Nintendo has a long history of developing innovative products while respecting the intellectual property rights of others," he said, elaborating that Nintendo has no problem fighting these kinds of suits when it believes the company has not "infringed another party's patent." Oh yeah, Nintendo? Well, how do you explain the Virtual Boy? It's obviously a complete rip-off of submarine periscope technology.
Nintendo gets Fenner Investments patent lawsuit dismissed, goes back to printing money
With DS sales continuing their astronomical climb and people still snagging Wii consoles off of shelves faster than you can say: "Your princess is in another castle," Nintendo's doing pretty well for itself in these difficult economic times. It's doing even better today on news that the lawsuit filed against it two years ago by Fenner Investments has been dismissed. The suit alleged that Nintendo inappropriately infringed on a 1998 patent relating to the monitoring of the position of analog joysticks in the Wii and GameCube. Since the company has been using analog sticks at least since 1996's N64, we didn't think this one would go far, and we don't think the proceedings against MS or Sony regarding the same patent will go any further. So, big N can now go back to focusing on other lawsuits and dreaming up new ways to take our hard earned cash.
Company sues Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo over joystick patent
Texas-based Fenner Investments shooting for the top with its latest lawsuit, suing Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for patent infringement. According to Fenner, who also happens to have sued Juniper Networks, Nokia, Cisco, Alcatel, and Ericsson for other alleged patent offenses early last year, the big three console makers are violating its patent for a "low-voltage joystick port interface," which it filed for in July, 1998 and was issued in October, 2001. The patent in question is describes a joystick port interface that includes "an integrated circuit receiving an analog joystick position measurement signal and outputting a digital pulse signal to a processor which signifies a joystick coordinate value," which would seem to cover just about any joystick with an analog stick. For their parts, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo appear to be staying mum on the subject, although we suspect this is one lawsuit they won't be losing too much sleep over.[Via Slashdot]
