Jury finds Nintendo Wii infringes Dallas inventor’s patent, awards $10M

Enlarge / The Nintendo Wii U Remote Plus is displayed in a showroom in Tokyo. (credit: Akio Kon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A jury has ruled that Nintendo must pay $10.1 million because its Wii and Wii U systems infringe a patent belonging to a Dallas medical motion-detection company.

iLife sued Nintendo (PDF) in 2013 after filing lawsuits against four other companies in 2012. The case went to a jury trial in Dallas, and yesterday the jury returned its verdict (PDF). They found that Nintendo infringed US Patent No. 6,864,796, first filed in 1999, which describes "systems and methods for evaluating movement of a body relative to an environment."

The patent drawings show a body-mounted motion detector that could detect falls in the elderly, which is the market that iLife was targeting, according to its now defunct website.

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