On Friday, July 17, Nintendo Co. Ltd. emerged victorious in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Quintal Research Group Inc. The suit alleged that Nintendo’s handheld gaming systems, such as Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo DSi, infringed a patent owned by Quintal. However, California federal judge Saundra Armstrong disagreed, awarding judgment to Nintendo.
In 2008, Quintal secured a patent for a “computerized information retrieval system.” As the patent proposes, this system is described as
“having a generally rectangular shape, with a display screen on one side that has a frame with an ergonomic placement of finger controls including a pair of thumb controls on the top of the display with at least one of the finger controls being a cursor or pointer control.”
Accordingly, Quintal informed Nintendo of this patent in 2009, offering Nintendo a license to produce such a system four times by the end of May. Upon Nintendo’s refusal, Quintal filed this patent infringement suit in February 2013, seeking damages, costs, and other relief if deemed appropriate by the court. Ultimately, however, Judge Armstrong ruled in favor of Nintendo, finding that Nintendo’s devices have multiple buttons in different shapes and sizes on each side of the video screen.