Zer0-Sum
01-10-2007, 08:05 PM
Patent law suits in America are getting out of hand. it seems every where I look on the Internet some jack assed company is suing some other company over obscure patents. It has been pointed out by many people that the American patent system is broken, perhaps beyond repair. I expect all three companies to band up together to crush these fools. But I guess time will tell. I don't think they will win, but hope that all or some of all three companies will just settle and toss them a bunch of money to go away. Microsoft might, but Nintendo and Sony will certainly tell Fenner to get fuct.
Who knew that game controllers were such contested territory? First Sony got sued for using rumble in their gamepads, and now Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are all charged with patent infringement. Fenner Investments filed a lawsuit against all three companies last week, alleging that they were in violation of the company's 6,297,751 patent for a "low-voltage joystick port interface." Does the lawsuit stand a chance?
Fenner has been involved with two similar patent claims against major companies, and appears to have had some success with both of them. In May 2006, Alcatel settled with Fenner, but the bigger case was a 2005 lawsuit against telecom heavyweights Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, Juniper, and others. That suit was finally dismissed in October 2006, but not before each of the companies settled with Fenner over its "system for managing access by mobile users to an interconnected communications network where a billing authority is identified by a billing code from the user."
Settlements are not often made public, so it can be hard to judge who came out ahead: did Fenner walk away with a dollar or a million of them? One law firm involved with the latter case called the settlements a "favorable result" (this is the same firm that produced a "Where's Waldo?" graphic for the case that showed how IP addresses could identify a user's location; we can't help but wonder if they secured permission from the copyright holder first).
The joystick port case concerns a patent filed in 1998 and granted in 2001. While most integrated circuits had previously run at 5V, the inventors believed that newer circuits would run at lower voltages. "Therefore," says the patent filing, "a low-power port is needed to interface the conventional 5 Volt joystick device with a lower-Volt integrated circuit."
Fenner apparently thinks that this particular port interface has been replicated by all three of the major console manufacturers. The suit gives no details yet and won't be resolved any time soon—not even in the Texas "rocket docket" where it was filed.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070110-8588.html
Who knew that game controllers were such contested territory? First Sony got sued for using rumble in their gamepads, and now Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are all charged with patent infringement. Fenner Investments filed a lawsuit against all three companies last week, alleging that they were in violation of the company's 6,297,751 patent for a "low-voltage joystick port interface." Does the lawsuit stand a chance?
Fenner has been involved with two similar patent claims against major companies, and appears to have had some success with both of them. In May 2006, Alcatel settled with Fenner, but the bigger case was a 2005 lawsuit against telecom heavyweights Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, Juniper, and others. That suit was finally dismissed in October 2006, but not before each of the companies settled with Fenner over its "system for managing access by mobile users to an interconnected communications network where a billing authority is identified by a billing code from the user."
Settlements are not often made public, so it can be hard to judge who came out ahead: did Fenner walk away with a dollar or a million of them? One law firm involved with the latter case called the settlements a "favorable result" (this is the same firm that produced a "Where's Waldo?" graphic for the case that showed how IP addresses could identify a user's location; we can't help but wonder if they secured permission from the copyright holder first).
The joystick port case concerns a patent filed in 1998 and granted in 2001. While most integrated circuits had previously run at 5V, the inventors believed that newer circuits would run at lower voltages. "Therefore," says the patent filing, "a low-power port is needed to interface the conventional 5 Volt joystick device with a lower-Volt integrated circuit."
Fenner apparently thinks that this particular port interface has been replicated by all three of the major console manufacturers. The suit gives no details yet and won't be resolved any time soon—not even in the Texas "rocket docket" where it was filed.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070110-8588.html