During the height of the Wii’s popularity, Nintendo was printing so much money that its executives surely filled a number of swimming pools, but it looks like whatever monkey’s paw made that success possible is finally turning the tables on Nintendo. As reported by Rolling Stone’s Glixel section, Nintendo has just lost a $10 million lawsuit against a company called iLife, with a jury ruling that the video game company had infringed on iLife’s motion-sensing accelerometer technology. iLife had designed its tech to “help prevent sudden infant death syndrome and the elderly to watch out for falls,” but it argued that the technology could be used for “other applications”—like, say, Wii Remotes.
Nintendo is planning to fight this, of course, saying in a statement it “does not infringe on iLife’s patent,” and even if it did, “the patent is invalid” because it wasn’t “properly written.” Nintendo will now be taking this to the court of appeals, where it will try to negate or reverse some of this $10 million damage. Even if things don’t work out for Super Mario and his friends, though, Nintendo should take a bit of solace in the fact that iLife was originally seeking a $4 per-unit royalty on all Wii console sales prior to the lawsuit, which would’ve been significantly more than $10 million.