Nintendo, which has won several previous patent suits surrounding its phenomenally popular Wii video game system, has found itself on the losing side of the latest one.
A Dallas jury has ordered the company to pay $10 million to iLife Technologies for using that company’s motion-sensing accelerometer technology in the Wii’s remote controls.
Nintendo says it plans to appeal the verdict.
The case started nearly four years ago, when iLife filed a $144 million patent infringement suit against the gaming company. The company says a technology it created to prevent sudden infant death syndrome and monitor the elderly for falls was incorporated into the “Wiimote” controller used to play tennis, bowl or control other motion-control games.
iLife is hardly the first company to take Nintendo to court over the Wii’s most notable technology. Last March, Nintendo won a case against UltimatePointer LLC and it has twice defeated patent-licensing companies Technology Properties Limited LLC, Phoenix Digital Solutions LLC and Patriot Scientific Corporation, most recently in Nov. 2015.
It hasn’t won all of the court battles, though. In 2014, Nintendo lost a case in the U.K., in which Koninklijke Philips said it was infringing on its patents for motion control technology for both the Wii controller and Wii U GamePad.
The companies settled that case later that year, agreeing to license parts of their patent portfolios to each other.
