rayen020 said:
Starke said:
rayen020 said:
this dear friends is called patent trolling and it is becoming an infamous practice in the technology business. Everything will probably be settled out of court for the big guys and some of that money will be used to pay legal fees for the court losses for the ones who have the patience to put through court. The difference will be paid to thinkoptics lawyers and the company that really owns the patent.
For fuck sake, will people stop calling this patent trolling. Patent trolling is where someone goes out there, buys a patent and then sues the shit out of people they think could be in violation, you know, precisely what has
not happened here.
It looks alot like patent trolling in my opinion. especially because of the time between release and lawsuit. thinkoptics created a product and patented it. If they didn't have enough money they very well may have sold into a company that did have enough money to sue. Maybe that happened maybe it didn't.
And what do you means that isn't what happened here. They are suing anyone who may have held a wii at somepoint. why are you getting so worked up about it anyway? you work at thinkoptics or something?
I'm irritated because teh stupids, tey burnz me! And, It's honestly that simple.
But, seriously, the plaintiffs in the case is the same company that sells the hardware. You just do not see that with patent trolling. If they'd sold the patent to a third party, then that party would be the plaintiffs, not the manufacturer.
The long lapse in a patent trolling case usually reflects that the patent has recently changed hands, but because that hasn't happened here, it basically means the exact opposite. Someone became suspicious, there was an investigation, and most likely an attempt at a settlement that Nintendo blew off, culminating in the lawsuit filing, which is what makes the news. And because it's civil litigation, they sued everyone who ever came within 10 feet of a Wii.
Kopikatsu said:
This is the Internet. You can't expect people to read. Prepare to watch your clarification drown in a sea of people screaming 'PATIENT TROLL'.
You're right, I do ask far too much of the internet sometimes.
Kopikatsu said:
However, if this lawsuit was successful...won't this be a massive gutpunch to Nintendo? They'd probably have to give up at least some of the money they've made off the Wii, they'd probably have to redevelop the Wii U, which will cost even more money (Assuming they're using the same system, and they probably are). And it's not like the Wii U doesn't already have a huge list of things going against it anyway.
Well, from what I've dug up on news articles on the subject, Nintendo could be in seriously deep shit here. Because they tried to patent their hardware, and apparently, after getting this patent cited against them decided to sell it anyway. Now, there is a trick here, having a patent cited against you isn't really an instant death thing, having a patent cited against you can be somewhat spurious.
For example, if you patent a motion tracking system, that measures relative changes in the position of a fixed point, and two years later I patent a system that looks for a point and tracks it as an absolute coordinate inside the range of the sensor, I might have your patent cited against mine. Now, I'll admit I'm not 100% certain of the procedure, but at that point, I'd either have to appeal or refile (not sure which it is), while demonstrating that my patent was not a duplication of yours because the method was significantly different.
And without examining either patent, it's entirely possible that this kind of thing is exactly what's going on, here. However, going along with a product deployment while a patent is contested is just plain stupid on several levels. I also get the impression from the news source cited, that there's actually multiple patent violations by Nintendo, not just the motion sensing patent at issue here.
The worst case scenario is, Nintendo could have an injunction preventing the importation, manufacture, distribution, or sale of any additional Wii systems or software in the US.
The retailers are probably safe, I mean, they're being targeted, but that's just standard procedure in civil litigation, once you start filing suit, hit everything that moves and a few things that don't. But, unlike Nintendo, they had no reason to believe the hardware would be in any way suspect.
