USPTO axes gaming patents in win for Lego and Warner Bros
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has sided with Lego and Warner Bros after it partially invalidated two patents owned by FigureFun.
In two separate decisions, issued on Thursday, September 26, the USPTO’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruled that certain claims of the patents were obvious by prior art.
The patents (US numbers 7,001,276 B2; and 7,338,377 B2) are for a token-based gaming machine and the accompanying token with a built-in chip.
FigureFun obtained the ‘377 and ‘276 patents in 2006 and 2008, respectively. Lego and Warner Bros petitioned for inter partes review of the patents, claiming they were obvious owing to four different prior art references.
The prior art cited by Lego and Warner Bros included four US patents (numbers 5,190,285; 6,460,851 B1; 7,081,033 B1; and 6,650,870 B2) and one UK patent (2,365,796).
The PTAB has now ruled against FigureFun, concluding that “a person of ordinary skill in the art would have had a reason to combine the asserted references with a reasonable expectation of success”.
In last Thursday’s decisions, the PTAB said that Lego and WarnerBros had proven the unpatentability of certain claims of FigureFun’s patents by a “preponderance of the evidence”.
FigureFun previously sued Lego and Warner Bros in 2017 for infringing the two patents at the US District Court for the District of Delaware.
According to FigureFun, the accompanying toy pads for the Lego Dimensions video game, published by Warner Bros, infringed its design for a “token with [a] built-in integrated circuit chip”.
In the game, users can build a lego ‘minifigure’ and import it into the game by placing it on the toy pad.
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