Context: In September 2024, Ireland-based patent licensing firm Malikie Innovations (which owns over 30,000 former BlackBerry patents) filed a patent infringement lawsuit against videogame device and software maker Nintendo in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington over six software patents. In parallel, it filed two complaints in the Unified Patent Court’s (UPC’s) Hamburg Local Division (LD) over two patents (completely unrelated to each other: UPC_CFI_555/2024 and UPC_CFI_537/2024: October 22, 2024 ip fray article). Nintendo then filed counterclaims for revocation over the patents-in-suit in March in the same court (UPC_CFI_215/2025 and UPC_CFI_214/2025). An interim conference was held on October 22.
What’s new: Malikie and Nintendo have withdrawn their respective infringement claims and revocation counterclaims in the UPC Hamburg LD, indicating that the companies have reached a settlement agreement at least in this jurisdiction.
Direct impact: The withdrawal of the claims and the subsequent cancelation of upcoming trials after the interim conference indicate that the companies have reached an agreement. However, there is no such indication yet in the U.S., where the Western District of Washington stayed proceedings last month because some of the patents were under invalidation pressure (a copy of the order granting the motion stay is below the box). Nintendo filed petitions for inter partes review (IPR) with the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in October (both are still pending).
Wider ramifications: Even just the withdrawal of the UPC litigation will be a very welcome development for Nintendo, which has been embroiled in patent infringement litigation with Pocketpair (the maker of Palworld) in Japan since 2024. Nintendo alleged that Palworld infringes on three of its Japanese patents, related to core Pokémon game mechanics, including character collection and gameplay systems, but the Japan Patent Office (JPO) cast serious doubt on the validity of two of the three patents-in-suit, rejecting one of them because the claimed technique lacked an inventive step (October 29, 2025 games fray article). Meanwhile, USPTO Director John A. Squires entered a Director Initiated Order for Ex Parte Reexamination of one of Nintendo’s patents, after identifying substantial new questions for patentability based on two prior art references (an old patent application by video game maker Konami and a more recent one by Nintendo itself: November 4, 2025 ip fray article).
The patents-in-suit in the UPC prong of the dispute included:
- 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”)
- EP2448225 (“Navigation tool holder”)
This is the order withdrawing the applications over the first patent:
And this is the order withdrawing the applications over the second patent:
The two patents are entirely unrelated, with one covering hardware and the other being more of a software patent.
In the U.S. prong, the patents-in-suit include:
- U.S. Patent No. 8,545,247 (“Dock for a portable electronic device”)
- U.S. Patent No. 8,115,731 (“Method of operating a handheld device for directional input”)
- U.S. Patent No. 9,542,571 (“System and method of owner application control of electronic devices”)
- U.S. Patent No. 8,610,397 (“Battery charger for portable devices and related methods”)
- U.S. Patent No. 7,529,305 (“Combination of space-time coding and spatial multiplexing, and the use of orthogonal transformation in space-time coding”)
- U.S. Patent No. 9,313,065 (“Scattered pilot pattern and channel estimation method for MIMO-OFDM systems”)
This is the order granting the stay in the U.S. prong of the dispute:
The parties filed their withdrawal notices with the UPC on Thanksgiving Day (November 27), which may be part of the reason why there have been no similar filings yet in the U.S. litigation, in which there is no impending hearing or decision.
Court and counsel
UPC
Hamburg LD: Presiding Judge Sabine Klepsch, Judge-rapporteur Dr. Stefan Schilling, Judge Marije Knijff, and Technically Qualified Judge Ulrike Keltsch.
Malikie was represented by Peterreins Schley’s Dr. Marc Grunwald and Dr. Thomas Adam, and (from the same firm) patent attorneys Dr. Frank Peterreins, Felix Gloeckler (“Glöckler” in German), and Martin Obster.
Meanwhile, Nintendo was represented by BARDEHLE PAGENBERG’s Johannes Heselberger.
United States
Judge James L. Robart, who is famous for issuing the first-ever standard-essential patent antisuit injunction (in Microsoft v. Motorola: October 2, 2012 Daily Journal article) and a landmark FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) rate-setting decision (August 14, 2015 Mintz article), both of which were affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is overseeing the case.
Malikie is being represented by Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP’s Jeff Leung, Khue Hoang, Matthew G Berkowitz, Michael M Polka, Patrick Robert Colsher, Taylor N Mauze, Yue Wang, and Townsend Legal LLC’s Roger Mulford Townsend.