Nintendo ordered to pay $21 million for patent infringement

by Alexander Sliwinski on May 15th 2008 11:35AM

Nintendo has been ordered to pay $21 million to Anascape Ltd. for infringing on a patent with its Gamecube and Wii Classic controllers. The AP reports Anascape Ltd., a "small East Texas gaming company," also sued Microsoft, but that was settled out of court. Nintendo says it will appeal the decision.

A representative for Nintendo stated that no infringement was found in any of the Wii's motion-sensing technology and it expects that on appeal the award to Anascape will be reduced "significantly." Remember kids, if you want to stick it to some big corporation in the future and cash in, just make patents for everything imaginable.

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Tags: anascape, GameCube, infringement, nintendo, patent, Wii

Reader Comments (52)

I'm not going to argue this, as cases like these are usually thrown out, so there might be something more to this one, but the patent I saw mentioned by Zertoss is pretty vague.

Eh, they'll be fiiiiine, either way.

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Copyrighting is just a way to shut down competition; big name companies do it all the time to smaller upstarts in order to keep their finances in check and stay #1; aka, monopoly. I personally don't care that a bigger company is being hit by a smaller one as a way of showing "copyrights are the most inane laws ever put into place."

Development will eventually cease if nobody is allowed to borrow ideas.

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