Nintendo sued over Wii technology -- again
- June 14, 2007 00:00 AM PST
The lawsuits for next-gen consoles just keep on rolling -- this time, a Texas company is suing the Nintendo Wii over a patent for semiconductor technology.
By Jason Coffee
Another day, another lawsuit over a next generation video game console. Lonestar Inventions, a Texas based technology company, has filed suit against Nintendo, alleging that the Wii "infringes on a patent that it holds for a high capacitance structure in a semiconductor device."
According to a report from Gamespot the patent in question was originally issued in 1993, and deals with saving space by utilizing layers of conducting strips to triple the effectiveness of parallel plate capacitors. Apperantly, the company is fairly litigious, as they have also sued Texas Instruments, Marvell Semiconductor, and the Eastman Kodak Company over the same patent. Most of those cases were eventually settled.
This latest generation of consoles has brought along with it a spate of legal action. Microsoft was brought to court by Lucent Technologies for a suit pertaining to the Xbox 360 and its MPEG-2 decoding capabilities. Nintendo was once taken to issue over the trigger on the Wii's remote control, although that suit was eventually dropped. And, as Gamepro previously reported, Sony will have to legally defend itself twice twice this year: one lawsuit is in regards to Sony's method of coating Blu-ray discs, while the other deals primarily with content security.
