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22 January 2020PatentsSarah Morgan

Court overturns $10m Nintendo verdict

In a victory for Nintendo, a US court has overturned a jury’s verdict which would have seen the video game company pay out $10 million in damages.

Last Friday, January 17, Chief Judge Barbara Lynn of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that a patent asserted against Nintendo’s Wii Remote wasn’t valid.

iLife Technologies, the owner of US patent number 6,864,796, had sued Nintendo back in 2013, claiming that the company had infringed six patents relating to a system and method for analysing activity of a body.

According to iLife, its technology, which was initially used to detect sudden death syndrome in babies and to detect falls by the elderly, had been used in 36 million Wii consoles remotes. The company was seeking royalties of $4 per console for a total of $144 million.

A Texas jury had found in favour of iLife in September 2017, finding that Nintendo had infringed the ‘796 patent and concluding that Nintendo had to pay more than $10 million in damages.

The following month, iLife asked the court to award an extra $15 million in interest to its award.

In response, Nintendo moved for judgment as a matter of law or, alternatively, a new trial.

Late last week, Lynn concluded that under the two-step Alice framework, iLife’s patent was unpatentable.

On step one, the judge said: “Nothing in claim 1, understood in light of the specification, requires anything other than conventional sensors and processors performing ‘conventional activit[ies] previously known to the industry’.”

On step two of the framework, Lynn concluded that there was no inventive concept in the claim elements, whether considered individually or as an ordered combination.

“Claim 1, as construed, does not add any meaningful limitations to the routine steps of data collection, analysis, and transmission using conventional computer components,” said Lynn.

The ‘796 patent was the last of six patents that iLife Technologies had originally asserted against Nintendo in 2013. In 2016, the US Patent and Trademark Office found the other five invalid in 2016.

Ajay Singh, Nintendo of America’s deputy general counsel, said: “Nintendo has a long history of developing new and unique products, and we are pleased that, after many years of litigation, the court agreed with Nintendo.

“We will continue to vigorously defend our products against companies seeking to profit off of technology they did not invent.”

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More on this story

Patents
1 September 2017   A jury at the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas has ruled in favour of iLife Technologies against Nintendo of America over technology used in the Nintendo Wii.
Patents
20 October 2017   iLife Technologies has asked a US district court to award an extra $15 million in interest to the $10 million it won against Nintendo of America for patent infringement.