flaming_squirrel said:
Starke said:
This isn't even remotely patent trolling. Patent trolling is when a company buys up patents, and then sues the fuck out of everyone in earshot because they want money.
This looks suspiciously like, the company actually produces a product, one of their patents got infringed upon, and they weren't able to work it out with the company in question. You know, what the patent system is supposed to do.
For 5 years? Yeah right.
Exactly right. With most patent trolls, they purchase the patent from someone else and then go after people they already identified as infringing. So you look for things, like a very short turnaround between when a company acquires a product and when a suit is filed.
But we know that that
is not the case here. The company produces an actual product, which, again, in case you had trouble understanding, is something patent trolls do not do.
Why, you might ask? Well, it's simple, patent trolling refers to a very specific kind of business model, where you look at a product, find a patent that they might be infringing, buy the patent and then sue the shit out of the product's manufacturer. The point is to make money off the lawsuit, not spend years selling some novelty doodad and
then sue someone. Because that shit is expensive.
flaming_squirrel said:
If the patents supposedly infringed upon were that serious then Wii would have been blocked from distribution as soon as it was released.
You're assuming they're psychic. They omniscient knew
how the Wii's controller was going to track motion before it was released, or that they would actively look into it and assume that the product would be infringing, which is, by the way, behavior that you
would expect from a patent troll.
You see, they don't have a patent on motion controls, they have a patent on a method of measuring motion for motion controls, hence why the PS3 Move and the Kinect aren't also getting sued.
Further, to actually get an injunction, they would have needed to have gotten their hands on technical data for how the Wii processed motion before the system came out, and then filed for it. Now, if a company knows you're about to turn out a competing product, and they can reasonably infer that you're going to be stepping on one of their patents, then they might have a chance to get a preliminary injunction, preventing the product from rolling out. But in this case, these people make remote controls, they had no reason to assume a video game console would infringe on their patents, because it would be monumentally stupid to flat out violate a patent in this way.
So by your logic, the only way they could not look like a patent troll would be by actually
being a patent troll.