United States Appeals Court Rules In Nintendo s Favour In Tomita Technologies 3DS Patent Case
United States Appeals Court Rules In Nintendo's Favour In Tomita Technologies 3DS Patent Case Nintendo Life <h1></h1> Another one bites the dust by Share: It looks as if the saga of Seijiro Tomita's patent case against the Nintendo 3DS is finally coming to an end. The United States Appeals Court has just confirmed that handheld console does not use technology covered in a patent asserted by Tomita Technologies USA, Inc. and Tomita Technologies International, Inc, stating that the 3DS uses technology that is "significantly different" from that covered in the patent. This marks the end of several years of litigation which began when former Sony staffer Tomita sued Nintendo , claiming that he had showed a prototype of his 3D screen technology to Nintendo officials at the company's headquarters in 2003. He stated that Nintendo had used the ideas behind his technology without paying him the proper licence. Tomita's legal action appeared to have gained results, as in March of 2013 , settling for $30.2 million in damages. Nintendo went on the offensive, and which saw the case back in court. In April last year, it was ruled by the New York Federal Court that Nintendo on Tomita's patent. This new ruling - by the US Appeals Court - follows a failed attempt by Tomita to enforce a similar patent claim in his native Japan. Here's what Ajay Singh, Nintendo of America's Director of Litigation and Compliance, had to say: We are very pleased with the Court's decision. Nintendo 3DS has never used the technology in Tomita's patent, and the Court's ruling confirms Nintendo's long tradition of using its own innovative technology. This case also proves once again that Nintendo will aggressively defend patent lawsuits when our products do not infringe, even when we must do so over many years, through multiple trials and in multiple countries. The message here seems simple - don't find yourself in a courtroom with Nintendo, because even when it loses, it eventually wins. Share: About Damien has over a decade of professional writing experience under his belt, as well as a repulsively hairy belly. Rumours that he turned down a role in The Hobbit to work on Nintendo Life are, to the best of our knowledge, completely and utterly unfounded. Comments ) Wow, a lot of back-and-forth going on here! Glad to see Nintendo haven't been doing anything wrong, just like we thought! There are too many companies trying to make a quick (or perhaps pretty long drawn out!) buck out of Nintendo... Take that! Ironically I was listening to Weird Al's Another One Rides The Bus earlier. Looks like Tomita Technologies finally rode the bus home. Phew...<br />I'm glad to hear Nintendo is NOT guilty about that case. Another troll beaten by Nintendo. Here is a portion of the patent for Tomita Technologies. An invention as set forth in Claim 3 resides in a stereoscopic video image pick-up and display system as defined in Claim 1 or 2 in which said cross-point measuring means calculates the cross-point position based upon the angle of the intersection of the optical axes in said two pick-up means. In accordance with the present invention, the distance between two image pick-up means can be measured based upon triangulation techniques and the distance between the pick-up means and the cross-point and object (scene) can be measured based upon the value of the angle at the intersection between the optical axes of said image pick-up means. The distance between two objects can be also measured. Based on what is read in this section the 2 cameras on the back of the 3ds which creates 3d imagery for you to view in the camera mode sounds pretty identical to the patent. I was curious about this because big corporations can fight constantly til a company finally backs out due to cost of case. This sounds like Nintendo will do whatever it takes to not lose regardless. Thank god Nintendo had Phoenix Wright working on the case. Capcom owed them a favor after Ryu and Megaman got into Smash. Now lets see Square Enix repay their favor for Cloud <br />with an exclusive FF9 remake for the Switch..............IT..........WILL............HAPPEN!!! Thanks to my complete lack of pop-culture education I think of a certain scene from Red vs Blue Season 13 when I see "Another one bites the dust" mentioned. The whole lawsuit was frivolous from the start. Tomita's patent very explicitly discusses a camera-based 3D system where the 3DS has never used a camara based system until the "super stable 3D" on N3DS, and that system is extremely different than the patent. Moreover, Nintendo just used a stock display from Sharp. It's Sharp who would be violating the patent directly even if it were that patent. If I recall, Tomita originally sued Sharp along with everyone using Sharp's displays. A lawsuit starting with the premise of suing for damages from patent infringement not just from the original violator but for all their customers too, is pretty fishy from the start. I somehow recall reading that Toshiba 'invented' the glasses-free 3D screen used in the 3DS. They also made a 3D-TV themselves using the same technology. Whoever had Nintendo as a customer regarding the 3DS upper screen, it's indeed clear that it has no relation to Tomita at all. And I'm happy that Nintendo got it settled the right way after that rediculous case from 2013. That is not up to Nintendo. If they don't have a case, they'll lose, and apparently, that simply wasn't what has happened here, so I'd say there were more than enough differences in these two patents. Based upon that evidence, the court ruled in their favor, so that cannot be interpreted as Nintendo doing "whatever it takes" to win, unless you mean that they just keep going if they feel they have a case against the accusations, which is what any sane person or company would do if they're falsely accused. <br />Cloud Strife on FF 9 Remake ?? NO!!! Cloud can stay in his own D!%@ game thank you very much. Cloud got into Smash Brothers, now its time for FF9 to be remade on the Switch. (P.S I am joking so don't take it offensively lol.) Did something new happen with relation to this 3D patent infringement? Isn't this ruling in favor of Nintendo almost a year old? Verdict, appeal, appeal of appeal, appeal of appeal verdict (and the countless months of docket foosball in between.) Will this Tomita dude pay the lawyers fees Nintendo had to pay all those years? Ah, ok. This confirms just how much I'd hate to be in court. I bet he would appeal again if he had enough money... Hmm, don't find yourself in court with Nintendo... probably a good idea. Still, it lets Nintendo trample all over Fair Use on YouTube and then charge people for not (allegedly) stealing all of their hard earned video money. Eventually the patent trolls go back under their bridge until a juicier wagon comes by. if you have a REAL patent infringement case, you probably don't have to sue everyone peripherally related to the company you claim infringed your patent Throwing darts at a granite dart board has more odds of success. Wasn't there a story recently about patent trolls getting prison time? I forget the details now, but Leanard French (the internet's favourite copyright lawyer) covered a case with some pretty hefty combined jailtime. Though I believe the people in that case bought the patents instead of actually inventing anything, so possible a different situation. Proving it's a shakedown is usually pretty difficult unless the trolls are sloppy. Most patent trolls buy the patents and are just a clearinghouse for holding patents. But generally you can bet that their lawyers are better in that field than your lawyers, and generally they set the terms for rewards such that it's always cheaper to just give them their blood money than to actually fight them. They're experts at setting that value. Occasionally they stupidly choose the wrong target that won't just settle for the blood money and will stonewall them until they've got nothing left like with Nintendo. Those are the only cases you MIGHT be able to prove criminal intent. Right now trolling is just like trick-or-treating. You go from company to company stating your demands, some fall through, most just pay whatever you tell them to pay. I'd love to see better solutions for dealing with it. But sadly not many troll cases even make it to the courts before settlement. It'd be funnier if you had been listening to "I'll Sue Ya" instead. I'm happy with this result because I don't think you should be able to own patents you don't actually use to make anything, and only own to claim royalties with, but the result came way too late, and killed any chance of 3D technology being used with whatever Nintendo's next portable would be (which was the Switch). Yay... Now wait for someone to patent-troll against HD Rumble, the IR sensor and other features of the Joy-Cons. It doesn't help that many patent cases have been migrated to jury trials. This encourages patent trolling, since the juries are so often comprised of "mandatory public jurists." As you know, they're basically just random people that the justice system subpoenas off the street for jury duty. To make matters worse, the prosecutor can dismiss certain jurists if they feel that one wouldn't work in their favor. Jurists can even be dismissed for holding up a decision because they're trying to be reasonable, while everyone else doesn't care about the case (partly because they have no stake in it, and have no clue what they're doing) and are trying to go home. (It's happened to my mother while serving jury duty... twice.) I bet something like that happened with the jury in the first case back in March 2013, where Nintendo originally lost. The American justice system is so damn screwed up, it's no wonder cases like this happen. Public jury duty verdicts are one of the dumbest ideas in the world. He also recently criticized Nintendo's Creators Program, explaining how it overlooks Fair Use: Thanks, I'd already watched that and have been aware of the issue for a while having been part of a YouTube community. I find it a shame that people feel they have to accept the program in order to keep their channels running. Paying into this kind of (alleged) extortion only enables it, otherwise the lack of social presence would be hurting Nintendo's bottomline. Probably the only way they'd realise how great free advertising is. Jury trials are a wonderful thing. But they were intended for common criminal cases. Murders, thefts, assaults, private property disputes, etc. Things that anybody can understand and render a verdict on based on being human and hearing both sides of the story. They were never intended for bureaucratic hair-splitting industry specific business law cases that have nothing to do with a criminal court and require understanding of the subject matter to render a fair assessment on. The roll it back to the time of the founding period, it would like having random jurists deliberating on trade treaty violations with France. It was also originally based on the idea where everybody knows everybody in an agrarian society with small districts. The idea of jury of peers was supposed to be a bunch of people you know staring at you and judging your actions, which the knowldge that if you commit a crime you'll be brought in front of a bunch of people you know to stare at you and judge you more times than not mitigated the desire to commit a crime to begin with. Random people from gerrymandered jury districting doesn't really solve that problem, but would still be better than arbitrary agenda-based judges' rulings were it not for prosecutional discretion. As always, the ideas were great until those with influence bent the system to their likeing. It might sound great in theory if one frames it in an idyllic situation. But when rapists and child molesters can go free, even when the evidence is stacked against them, just because the jury system can be manipulated at will, it has lost it's purpose in life. Not like it was ever a good idea in America- the Salem witch trials should have been proof of that. Most people have no idea what they're doing when it comes to the law. Never underestimate the stupidity of those who don't care what happens in the lives of others. Maybe if the United States had been constructed closer to how the Haudenosaunee (Iroqois) Confederacy worked, a jury system would work. (Funnily enough, their Laws greatly influenced the more democratic aspects of the Constitution...) But the modern day American jury system is impossible to fix as it stands. It just needs to die, and allow the greater American justice system to take a hint from the South African justice system. Well, my impression of your politics from years of lurking on the forum is that you're something of an anarchist I find I often agree with your stating point and basis, and then you lose me in the details and I think "whoa, I was NOT expecting that to go THERE!" So we probably won't often strongly agree or strongly disagree on such things but end up in generally different places all the same. All that said, the starting point being "innocent until proven guilty" which IS a good starting point, or at least the argument can be made for such. The thinking is, it's better to let a rapist or child molester go free if it can't be absolutely proven they're guilty, than to convict, falsely, someone of being one who was not. It's not a bad ideal. There's never going to be ANY system that is 100% accurate and 100% perfect in all verdicts, so a system that errs on the side of the rapist we all know is guilty going free, versus convicting you of being a rapist and sending you away for life because "well the evidence was close enough" when you really did no such thing isn't a bad starting point at all. It's DIFFERENT from what many places do, but both our adversarial system and the more popular inquisitional system are BOTH actually based entirely on the Roman Code of Justinian. Scholars have spent centuries arguing which system is better, most have agreed that most of the time, both arrive at the same result anyway, but that debate will never be settled. You may prefer a system where 100% of all rapists get locked away, even if some innocents get locked away with them, and, well, there's places that do that. Personally, I'm glad I'm not there, much as the error on this side sucks too. As for Juries, it's an extension of that thinking. Basic trials for cases like that, a random collection of a dozen people should be able to sift through the basic facts presented and determine guilt or innocence. "Beyond a shadow of a doubt" being the watchword. If you're not POSITIVE, then the verdict is "not-guilty." Again, the error is on the side of only the truly guilty being sentenced, only when guilt is unquestionable to prevent imprisoning innocents. So if you want to get rid of Juries (we can agree, juries have no place in corporate or IP law, and they were never SUPOSED to be used for that. That's a state-level perversion in states that allow that) then you prefer a system were a single judge, a careerist politically appointed bureaucrat, who, depending on state, may or may not actually even be a lawyer or have any legal training at all, decides the fate of individuals? A dozen random nobodies may not know what they're doing, but the thinking is that even a dozen random nobodies that have no idea what they're doing is STILL more likely to render a fair verdict than a careerist bureaucrat with a personal agenda of ambition at worst, and a pension-fulfilling apathy at best (Ohh...the judges that don't even READ the docket and just rubber stamp everything.....) To be fair, there are definitely plenty of genuine jurists on the bench. Possibly a minority, but they're there. But a bench is still a politically appointed position often to those of political affiliation and connection, and is often offered to those of political ambition on their own. In some states they are not required to have any legal knowledge and are a purely political hack. In most cases they ARE lawyers, and have associations and affiliations with various (large) firms, and favor partners, and those "on the inside" to get their quotas and perfect records in the rotating door of the firms they affiliate with. Assuming they're not gunning their way up the political escalator. Now you might get a case with an excellent judge who interperets the law to the letter. Or you might get one that's aiming to get the right verdicts to advance their career or benefit their colleagues. Or you might get the one that simply doesn't care so long as he/she clocks out and can make it to retirement day. I'd take the 12:1 odds of the pool of construction workers reaching the right conclusion on a jury any day over my 1:3 odds with the appointees, which was the point of the system. The interesting thing here is the things that you dislike about the jury system are in fact not actually complaints about the jury system. They're complaints about the fact that we no longer really have one. The system you say you'd prefer is actually the one you're complaining about. The manipulation of juries, starting with prosecutorial discretion needs to be thrown out. It was ALWAYS a grotesque perversion of the original intent. All these problems with jury manipulation are "the system" (those appointees and their associates) figuring out how to game the system to basically cut out any utility of a jury interfering with their pre-determined results system so that it effectively mimics an inquisitional system masquerading as an an adversarial system. That's just the tip of the ice berg in terms of the layers of corruption throughout the legal system, and the law itself (when the system was founded laws were supposed to be simple, basic, and readily understandable. The constitution was written on a handful of pieces of parchment to establish the ruling law of an entire country. Today we have 500 page law binders for the title regulations of a parking meter. THAT is, above all else, the prevailing problem with the legal system. Nintendo FTW Well, for whatever it's worth, when I took the political compass test, I landed smack dab in the middle of the lower left quadrant (libertarian left), while every American president within my life time resides somewhere between the middle and more extreme ends of the upper right quadrant (authoritarian right)... So while I wouldn't call myself an anarchist, you're not far off the mark. It's true that "innocent until proven guilty" is a very fair concept, greatly inspired as a response to the aforementioned Salem witch trials, as well as being in resistance to monarchic absolutism. However, when it comes down to it, justice is relative, even subjective. There's no such thing as "objective justice." Putting on a blindfold is intended to impart impartiality, but in truth, it inevitably opens up Lady Justice to being duped. Her scale only truly holds meaning if she can see what's being weighed on it, for she was not born blind, and thus does not have the heightened senses of one who was. We seek to trust others to see the scales in her stead, but are the external viewers truly qualified to judge and place the contents upon the scales? You wouldn't pay someone who you know is inexperienced, and doesn't have their heart in the right place, to fix your house's electrical wiring, plumbing, or walls/roofing, would you? So why do we subpoena random people, who rarely ever have any law experience or knowledge (and when they do, they're often controlled), to supplement the infrastructure of our justice system? I don't expect perfection, but I believe it's reasonable to expect the system to not be rigged. You have a good point about "career politician" judges. Unfortunately, though, this is a fatal flaw built into the American justice system from the ground up- those who appoint higher judges are always related to a (primary) political party. (And now big campaign donors, by proxy.) The situation becomes worse as rank increases, with the Supreme Court appointments often being the most politically biased of all. In the USA in particular, the appointment of someone who is absolutely biased, like Antonin Scalia, can change the fates of billions of people across the Earth. Where's the blindfold there? No one with such leverage over a justice system should be able to single-handedly direct history. Ideally, judge appointments at all levels of government should be completely apolitical and unaffiliated. But alas, that is virtually impossible in the American justice system when going anywhere above local/district courts. You also have a good point about bureaucracy being a huge inhibitor of efficiency. On a related note, my mother (who works for NOAA) has remarked to me on several occasions that if terrorists ever really wanted to easily destroy the American government, they wouldn't need a single explosive- all they'd have to do is overload the government's bureaucratic flow to cripple it. (Of course, this incidentally opens up a whole bunch of questions regarding the true purpose of the existence and genesis of the most well-informed terrorist organizations, who must surely be aware of this potential, but that's a can of worms I won't go into here.) It's a miracle for the current state of governmental bureaucracy to function at all, to the point that it seems cunningly calculated. In any case, with current events as they are, it would seem that a major upheaval is going to come along sooner rather than later. I think the only hope for improvement is to focus more on localities. Leave A Comment Hold on there, you need to to post a comment... <h2>Related Articles</h2> Don't Leaf me this way "Thank you for using our service"