You probably all know this, since it came down the pipes while the site was inoperable.

But late last week Nintendo got its first reported lawsuit over the Wii controller.

You knew it was going to happen. But I figured it would be for "personal injury" and not "patent infringment."

According to Kotaku, Interlink Electronics of California filed suit against Nintendo for allegedly ripping off its trigger.

Yeah, you read that right. See, Interlink says it invented a "trigger" for handheld interface devices for business uses, like PowerPoint presentations and remotely beating the Oompa-Loompas back into their cages at night.

I may have made that second part up.

Anyway, one of Internlink's patents includes a trigger -- a trigger suspiciously trigger shaped and postitioned in the front of a controller so that your finger may "pull" it.

Pretty damn revolutionary, I'd say.

And the Wii just so happens to have... wait for it... A TRIGGER!! That's right, ladies and gentlement, the papers filed in the state of Delaware so far have noted that Internlink Electronics is devastated -- nay, on the verge of bankruptcy -- because Nintento used a TRIGGER!!

Why may this not be as straightforward as it sounds? Why shouldn't you be worried about the Wii?

After the jump...

(Ed. Note: Reader Ty corrected my recollection of who sued whom in the past. Made the corrections, and thank-you to Ty for kick-starting the brain cells that were apparently killed off from all those years of, ... uhhh... oh, nevermind.)

Okay, as someone who has been around the block a few times with stories like these, lawsuits fall into two kinds of catagories: Those that are filed to be fought and those that are filed to be settled.

There's been a relatively recent spate in the last, I'd say, dozen years where you are seeing a whole lot fewer of the former and a whole lot more of the latter.

It's a scam. A while-collar version of drilling for oil. Small companies that will never make enough to survive more than a few years pump out a bunch of patents -- be they for small bits of code or small "pieces" of technology. They never intend to use them because these companies don't produce much. They are in the business of owning patents.

They are meant to be landmines for companies like Sony, Microsoft, Verizon, Nissan, Toyota, and, in this case, Nintendo.

These companies file their patents, hire a bunch of lawyers and wait until some large company comes out with a new product that just MIGHT contain a part of that patented code or technology.

And then it's on. The small company comes out with guns blazing, filing suits in such a way as to garner the most amount of publicity, and then it refuses to back down until the big company agrees to settle for some ungodly buttdarted amount of money or a judge awards a percentage of retail sales of the larger company, amounting into the millions or sometimes billions.

It has been happening for years. Case in point: the Blackberry. When Blackberry took off, 16 different lawsuits were filed against RIM, the makers of the Blackberry, by little three-letter-acronym companies all claiming patent infringment. All but five were tossed. The most famous of the survivors was a company called SCO NTP, which won a gigantic settlement from RIM that almost put the PDA-maker out of business.

(Ed. Note: As pointed out by an astute reader, SCO didn't sue RIM. It did, however, do pretty much the same thing to IBM over Unix, and it did later sue Novell. So hard to keep track of these patent-mining suits!)

Unfortunately, in the last, I'd say, five or six years, these suits have become more and more successful as these smaller companies are getting very foxy about how they write their patents and the attorneys they hire. They are written to be as broad as possible so as to trap as many flies in the web as they can, and attorneys who in years past would have laughed a little guy out of their offices at the idea of suing Microsoft are actually advertising for those kinds of cases.

Is this one of those "patent mining" lawsuits? Too early to tell, but it has a very distinct smell of one, in my opinion.

So, given recent history, Nintendo would be wise to settle this. But it's not the right thing to do. At least at first glance of the initial filings, it appears that there's little more complaint from Internlink about Wii's trigger other than it's a trigger.

And, if that is something to be sued over, I'd rather think Smith and Wesson might be very interested in knowing what Interlink is making.

[From Kotaku]