The lawsuit which was filed by iLife Technologies against Nintendo was recently ruled on, and Nintendo has been asked to pay $10 million to iLife. That’s far less than the nearly $150 million iLife originally asked for. The suit was filed against Nintendo four years ago for using iLife technology when creating its motion-sensing Wii remote controller.
iLife Technologies reported that Nintendo has used their motion-sensing patent in the Wii and Wii U video game systems. Before filing the lawsuit, iLife asked for $4 as royalty per unit of the 36 million Wii Systems sold in six years. The allegations were denied by Nintendo at the time, and the gaming icon said that it didn’t infringe on the patent. It further claimed that the patent was improperly written, thus causing it to be invalid.
“Nintendo has a long history of developing innovative products and we will continue to vigorously defend all our products from meritless patent lawsuits,” said Singh.
iLife Technologies uses its motion-sensing technology for medical applications, to monitor infants to help prevent sudden death, or to detect if a person has fallen down. There is no clarity on what exactly iLife has used its patents for, and there were questions at the time of the original filing as to whether or not iLife was being a patent troll. The information around this is still far from being crystal clear.
iLife’s argument is that Nintendo has used this technology in other applications as well. During this period iLife filed several such lawsuits against Nintendo, and this is one of them. Similar to the Nintendo lawsuit, iLife also filed patent infringement suits against Fitbit and Under Armour. Both companies’ suits were dismissed by the companies themselves, and were settled out of court.
Nintendo is not satisfied with the verdict and is confident that the company has not infringed any iLife patent, and that the patent is invalid. The company has decided to raise the issue with the district court and with the court of appeals.