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Nintendo, Microsoft prevail in joystick lawsuit
- March 17, 2009 05:04 AM PST
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A judge in the U.S. state of Texas has thrown out a lawsuit filed against Nintendo and Microsoft that alleged the two companies infringed on a patent covering an interface for joysticks.
Wii free of infringment allegations
The suit was filed in 2007 by Texas-based Fenner Investments and a jury trial was due to begin on Tuesday but on Monday Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court in Tyler, Texas, dismissed the case.
"We are very pleased with the court's decision," said Rick Flamm, Nintendo of America's legal counsel in a statement. "Nintendo has a long history of developing innovative products while respecting the intellectual property rights of others. We also vigorously defend patent lawsuits when we firmly believe that we have not infringed another party's patent, despite the risks that this policy entails."
The patent in question, U.S. patent 6,297,751, was granted in 2001 to Lucent Technologies for a "low-voltage joystick port interface" that converts analog signals from a joystick to digital signals that signify its position. At some point afterwards it was acquired by Fenner, which had previously pursued patent claims against companies including Alcatel, 3Com, Juniper Networks and Hewlett-Packard in the same court.
The original complaint also named Sony when it was filed on Jan. 5, 2007, but amended on Feb. 26 to remove the company's name. No information was provided about why the company dropped its pursuit of Sony.
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- Mar 17 2009 at 06:16:14:AM PST
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Converts analog signals from a joystick to digital signals that signify its position.... You'd think it would be Wii and Sony... I didn't know that MS controller had that functionality... anyway, just another crazy company trying to take credit (and money) for other people's work
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That patent description sounded pretty vague anyway. Yeah, this was just some firm trying to get some patent ready for anyone to tread upon to get free money
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Of course Microsoft uses a similar technology, Toneman. How do you think that the Xbox registers the movements of the analog thumb stick on it's controller?
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what about analog sticks from consoles in the 90s like the Nintendo 64? The technology has been around for awhile, why did they wait so long to file a lawsuit, and how could they when game controllers had analog sticks before 2001?
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SilentGhosteye wrote:
what about analog sticks from consoles in the 90s like the Nintendo 64? The technology has been around for awhile, why did they wait so long to file a lawsuit, and how could they when game controllers had analog sticks before 2001?
It's all confusing. Glad it was thrown out. Patent trolls. I hope Sony didn't give them money.
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dinnerbandit wrote:
Of course Microsoft uses a similar technology, Toneman. How do you think that the Xbox registers the movements of the analog thumb stick on it's controller?OK, that makes sense... I though they meant the position of the controller itself (sixaxis, motion controls), but I guess they meant the position of the analog sticks... well in that case, shouldn't they have sued Nintendo in 1996 for the N64 controller?
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Funny thing is, Sony is the only system with 2 analog sticks, but they're going after MS and Nintendo... go figure. Maybe Sony uses a different tech altogether. Either way... DENIED!
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