Nintendo triumphs again in Wii patent dispute
Video game company Nintendo has for the second time successfully defended claims that its Wii console infringes a patent owned by a Texan company.
Triton Tech sued Nintendo in 2010, alleging that the Wii remote, combined with an accessory, infringed its ‘181 patent.
But the patent was invalidated last year by the US District Court for the Western District of Washington for being “indefinite”—which means it did not adequately describe a complete invention.
On June 13, judges Kimberly Moore, Jimmie Reyna and Todd Hughes at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the ruling.
“We are very pleased with this result,” said Richard Medway, Nintendo of America’s deputy general counsel.
“Nintendo has a long tradition of developing unique and innovative products, while respecting the IP rights of others. Nintendo continues to aggressively defend itself against patent trolls. After many years of litigation, the decision reflects an appropriate resolution of this case,” he said.
The ‘181 patent protects an input device for a computer, allowing users to manipulate an object represented graphically on the computer.
But each asserted claim recites an “integrator means”, a term that rendered the claims invalid according to the district court, because the patent did not disclose any algorithm for performing the integration function.
The appeals judges agreed, saying: “It is certainly true that an algorithm can be expressed in many forms … However, merely using the term ‘numerical integration’ does not disclose an algorithm—i.e., a step-by-step procedure—for performing the claimed function.”
Writing on the Patent Docs blog, Michael Borella, associate at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP, said the decision should not be surprising in light of the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Nautilus v. Biosig Instruments.
In that case, he said, the Supreme Court held that “a patent is invalid for indefiniteness if its claims, read in light of the patent's specification and prosecution history, fail to inform, with reasonable certainty, those skilled in the art about the scope of the invention”.
