April 29, 2016—Tomita Technologies USA, LLC was handed a devastating loss earlier this week in its long-enduring battle with Nintendo over stereoscopic (i.e. 3D) image technology. Back in 2013, Nintendo lost a patent infringement jury trial in the Southern District of New York and was ordered to pay $30.2 million in damages to Seijiro Tomita, the inventor of United States Patent No. 7,164,664. Roughly speaking, the ‘664 Patent provides a way to display 3D images without the need for 3D glasses. Tomita had accused Nintendo’s 3DS system of infringing the patent.
Nintendo appealed the original jury verdict to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Federal Circuit then reversed the construction of a critical claim term underlying the original judgment, which required a new trial in the district court. The district court concluded in the new trial that Nintendo did not infringe the patent because the means by which the 3DS accomplished its stereoscopic image was different (and frankly, more sophisticated) than the means disclosed and claimed in the ‘664 patent.
Ultimately, Tomita lost in this case as a result of something known in patent law as “means-plus-function” claiming. Dennis Crouch over at Patently-O previously did a nice summary of the what “means-plus-function” claiming is, and why such claiming is starting to fall out of favor with patent applicants. When you draft a patent claim that identifies a functional attribute of your invention, the protection of the patent is generally limited to the particular structure you have used and disclosed to accomplish this function. Tomita’s invention depended primarily on hardware components to accomplish the image offset function, whereas Nintendo relied primarily on software algorithms.
Aside from resulting in a bad day for Tomita, this lawsuit highlights again the difficulties that we are currently facing with regards to intellectual property protection for functions that are accomplishable with software. As it currently sits, the United States does not have any clear protection scheme for protecting software rights. Rather, software is “protected” through a mishmash of patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law, none of which were truly designed to work for software. (See here.)
Our intellectual property regime also has problems with trying to protect inventions in a world where technological capabilities are expanding at break-neck speed. Often times, important inventions from the “analog” world can be replicated through software or digital means and in the case of a “means-plus-function” patent, that will frequently be sufficient to avoid infringement. At some point, we need to make a policy decision as to whether we think this is okay.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the differences between the Nintendo and Tomita functions were merely one using software while the other used hardware; there appeared to be additional differences as well. However, I think a case like this presents a good opportunity to ask the questions about how intellectual property rights should be considered in our environment of constantly evolving technological capability. We need to find a new balance between incentivizing invention without creating undue obstacles to innovation.
