I keep wondering whether the court knows of any obvious prior art, whether the company suing has any applications of their patent (any practical/tangible examples) to show it's been more than an idea, why they took so gosh-darn long to bring it up if the controllers are in your face if you ever go outside and look for it, why there are certain controllers that also "infringe" but somehow get off the hook (one article brought up that the third-party controllers don't appear to be banned)... and so on. Another article suggested that it'd cost less to settle (what Sony and Microsoft did) than fight this.
Regardless whether there's any merit to it, it just makes me mad because I don't get the impression that the company suing is actually doing ANYTHING with their patent, or even actively looking out for anything infringing on it. They can't be if they're waiting years, waiting to find some company who makes a bajillion dollars off of it, before suing them. And to threaten to ban a game controller, of all things... well, ok, in perspective, there was that patent war which meant rumble couldn't be put into a controller by... Sony or Microsoft, one of those two. But rumble's been around on N64 and GameCube, why... how did Nintendo get off the hook there? Did they settle? Money and time wasted to put in a controller feature that by now is a no-brainer, we knew it was going to come eventually.
That's all I see this as. Countless infringing-patent suits, usually for patents that are only vaguely related and, again, years and multiple prior art examples later.
There's just no good that comes from it. Isn't this very likely to hurt the stock value / reputation of the company suing? Plus, it's impossible these days to create anything without infringing on a patent. It has to happen, you have to build upon someone else's ideas. I'll shoot myself if there's a lawsuit because someone used the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus without permission.
What I'd rather ponder on is whether the infringing-patent suits has yet reached the ridiculous level of Jack Thompson trying to ban anything by Rockstar. Thompson's a distant memory now, but we remember there was eventually a time when April Fools stories were indistinguishable from the real thing when it came to that man.
If and when I get a Wii, I'd LOVE to explain to someone "Oh, the reason you can't get a Classic controller? Some company you never heard of banned them."
