Context: Ireland-based patent licensing firm Malikie Innovations (corporate website) filed a patent infringement lawsuit against videogame device and software maker Nintendo in the Western District of Washington that became discoverable last month. Malikie owns 30K+ former BlackBerry patents.
What’s new: It now turns out that this patent enforcement campaign also has a European part. Two Malikie v. Nintendo cases were filed in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) about a week after the U.S. lawsuit. The European patents-in-suit are EP2448225 (“Navigation tool holder”) and EP2579551 (“Method and apparatus pertaining to automatically performing an application function of an electronic device based upon detecting a change in physical configuration of the device”). Both UPC actions were filed with the Hamburg Local Division (LD).
Direct impact: In addition to the specter of the willfulness enhancements that Malikie is seeking in the U.S. after Nintendo allegedly declined to take a license, Nintendo now also faces the risk of multi-country patent injunctions in Europe. The UPC has 18 contracting states and may even have jurisdiction in other countries in which EPO-granted patents are registered.
Wider ramifications: Nintendo regularly finds itself on the receiving end of patent lawsuits, but at the moment its highest-profile case is an offensive one. Nintendo is asserting various Japanese software patents (which are simply game rule patents) against Pocketpair, a smaller company whose overnight success Palworld bears a certain resemblance to Nintendo’s Pokémon franchise (some call it “Pokémon with guns”) (September 19, 2024 press release by Nintendo).
Just to provide some context, here’s the U.S. patent infringement complaint in which Malikie describes Nintendo as an unwilling licensee that continued to infringe despite being put on notice:
The two European patents-in-suit do not appear to have U.S. counterparts. One is a hardware patent and the other links physical configuration changes to software application functions.
Panel: Presiding Judge Sabine Klepsch, Judge Dr. Stefan Schilling and Judge Marije Knijff. They may also appoint a Technically Qualified Judge.
Malikie is being represented by Peterreins Schley’s Dr. Thomas Adam and Dr. Marc Grunwald. Counsel for Nintendo is not listed in the UPC’s case registry yet.