Another day, another patent lawsuit (Nintendo, MS)

[one]

It also implies that in order for them to reach their patent they had to infringe on Nintendo's. They took Nintendo's patented design, and "improved" it, but at it's core, it's still Nintendo's design.

Do you suggest Nintendo has the basic patent and Anascape has its improvement patent? A basic patent holder has no rights to implement an improvement patent without permission and vice versa, so they usually conclude a cross-license agreement. But Anascape seems to have no interest in actually implementing it by cross-licensing.

 

[Simon F]

For some strange reason I see them having a lot of trouble suing companies for patent infringment when the patent themselves refer to those companies as holding related prior art patents.

Slightly OT but that's pretty much a requirement in a patent application - you need to cite prior art and explain why your invention is an improvement.

 

[DemoCoder]

No matter how you dress up Immersion, the fact is, their "technology" is completely obvious tech that has been used in sex toys for years. Yes, in Haptics in the medical field they have honest to goodness innovations, but those advanced haptics weren't pulling in the money in the early years, so they went after the game market. I really don't care what the courts say about the legitimacy of their patent, frankly, it's hard to get juries to overturn patents. It's obvious to me that prior art existed. Hell, I "invented" immersion tech myself in 1988 for a high school project where I used a rotating assymmetric rotating mass (e.g. vibrator) controlled by my Commodore 64 to vibrate a plate with sand on it to demonstrate patterns that would develop.

 

[Powderkeg]

No matter how you dress up Immersion, the fact is, their "technology" is completely obvious tech that has been used in sex toys for years.

Let me know when they try to apply their patents to the sex toy industry.

Last time I checked their patents are specifically for controllers, not just any use of vibration. I mean if we are going to say similar ideas means a patent should be invalid then DLP televisions that use a colorwheel shouldn't be allowed patents because the Vatican has had windows where white light passes through colored glass creating images on the floor for hundreds of years, right?