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Nintendo Loses Wii Remote Patent Lawsuit, Ordered To Pay Out $10 Million

A jury has found that Nintendo infringed on a patent.

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As with anything as popular as the Wii, Nintendo has faced numerous lawsuits over the years regarding its home console. One such case came to a close just this week--at least for now--with a jury ruling against Nintendo and ordering it to pay $10 million.

This particular lawsuit was first filed by the tech company iLife in Texas District Court back in 2013. It alleged that Nintendo had infringed on patents owned by iLife, claiming devices like the Wii, Wii Remote, and Wii U "contain systems or methods for body movement detection, body movement evaluation, body movement analysis, receiving body movement signals, analyzing body movement signals, responding to body movement signals, and remotely monitoring body movement signals." It was one of several such lawsuits iLife filed around that time.

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It's unclear what, exactly, iLife has used its patents for, and there were questions at the time if it was functioning as a patent troll. Despite that, the jury in the case against Nintendo has now reached a verdict, finding it did indeed infringe on one specific patent. As a result, Nintendo has been ordered to pay iLife $10.1 million--far less than the nearly $150 million iLife originally sought.

As is to be expected, Nintendo said that it plans to appeal, meaning this process is not yet at its end. "On Aug. 31, 2017, a jury in Texas found that certain Wii and Wii U video game systems and software bundles infringed a patent belonging to iLife Technologies Inc. related to detecting if a person has fallen down," Nintendo said in a statement shared with GameSpot (first reported by Glixel). "The jury awarded iLife $10 million in damages. Nintendo disagrees with the decision, as Nintendo does not infringe iLife’s patent and the patent is invalid. Nintendo looks forward to raising those issues with the district court and with the court of appeals."

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