A UK court rules that Nintendo did indeed infringe on Philips’ patent
For some time now, Nintendo has been locked in a legal battle with Philips over patents registered back in 2011 regarding gesture recognition and motion control. Philips claimed to have patented these ideas long before Nintendo, which resulted in a bitter conflict between the two companies, and now a UK court has ruled in favor of Philips.
Nintendo plans to appeal the legal decision against the first two patents, and damages will be announced during a hearing we can expect to glean more information from next month.
This all goes back to Philips’ plan to get the Wii U banned from sale in the US, which is a rather lofty goal indeed. The company is pursuing the same copyright claims in several other countries as well.
Nintendo released a statement regarding the legal brouhaha: “Nintendo is committed to ensuring that this judgement does not affect continued sales of its highly acclaimed line of video game hardware, software and accessories and will actively pursue all such legitimate steps as are necessary to avoid any interruptions to its business.”
It will be interesting to see what eventually goes down, but I’m thinking the damages will almost certainly be minimal when it’s all said and done.
UK court rules against Nintendo in Wii patent battle [Eurogamer]
