Nintendo has recently announced it had come out on top in a recent lawsuit filed by Triton Tech of Texas, LLC.

Nintendo has been involved in a number of patent battles over the past few years.  One of the most recent is against Triton Tech of Texas, LLC, who alleged Nintendo’s Wii Remote infringed on their patent: U.S. Patent No. 5,181,181, which was filed in 1990 and published in 1993:

A mouse which senses six degrees of motion arising from movement of the mouse within three dimensions. A hand-held device includes three accelerometers for sensing linear translation along three axes of a Cartesian coordinate system and three angular rate sensors for sensing angular rotation about the three axes. Signals produced by the sensors are processed to permit the acceleration, velocity and relative position and attitude of the device to be conveyed to a computer. Thus, a person may interact with a computer with six degrees of motion in three-dimensional space. Computer interface ports and unique address identification ensure proper communication with the computer regardless of the orientation of the mouse.

The lawsuit was filed back in 2010, with Triton wishing to take action against Nintendo of America as well as Apple for their iPhone.  According the the suit, Triton wanted compensation of “reasonable royalties with interests and costs”.

On June 27, 2013, Seattle’s District Court ruled that the patent does not offer a complete invention, and therefore the patent is considered invalid.

ORDER by Judge Richard A Jones. In light of the parties’ joint statement, the court finds no reason to delay entry of judgment. For the reasons stated in the June 4 order, it finds the asserted claims of the patent-in-suit to be indefinite, and thus invalid. The court directs the clerk to dismiss this case with prejudice, and to enter judgment for Defendant. (CL)

Nintendo has won this case, but unfortunately for them, there are most likely many more just around the corner.  Hopefully Nintendo can keep up the pace of either winning these kinds of lawsuits or having them dismissed.