Nintendo faces second Wii lawsuit in 6 months

[halojames]

Last year, Lucent Technologies took Microsoft to court over the Xbox 360’s out-of-the-box MPEG-2 decoding abilities. Sony has also faced it is share of legal cases, and now it’s Nintendo’s turn again, the second that it has faced within a year.

According to an attorney for the plaintiff, Texas-based Lonestar Inventions alleges that the Wii infringes on a patent it holds for a “high capacitance structure in a semiconductor device.” The patent at the centre of the case was first issued in 1993, and details a space-saving method tripling the effectiveness of parallel plate capacitors by using layers of conducting strips.

GameSpot reports that this is not the first time that Lonestar has gone to court over the patent in question. Previous disputes with Texas Instruments and Marvell Semiconductor were fought and eventually settled, whilst earlier this month, the company also sued the Eastman Kodak Company alleging infringement of the patent

A Nintendo representative told GameSpot that, “Nintendo of America received no prior contact from Lonestar before they filed a lawsuit. Additionally, the lawsuit itself does not identify any product or component from Nintendo, making it impossible for Nintendo to publicly comment on this matter.”

In December 2006, Interlink Electronics, Inc., a California company that specializes in the design and manufacturing of interface devices, alleges that the trigger on the bottom of the Wii controller infringes on Interlink Patent No. 6,850,221 (Trigger Operated Electronic Device), which the company secured on February 1, 2005. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata first presented the Wii controller to the public not too long after that date, during the 2005 Tokyo Game Show.

Looks like, in addition to the dodgy NES-emulating cellphone that we reported on earlier this week, Nintendo’s lawyers have a busy time ahead of themselves.

[wiifro]

oh well....high structure semiconductor device....ya can anyone clarify that for me?