Hillcrest is seeking to block imports of the Wii and Wii remotes, according to a complaint filed today with the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington. Hillcrest also filed a civil suit in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"While Hillcrest Labs has a great deal of respect for Nintendo and the Wii, Hillcrest Labs believes that Nintendo is in clear violation of its patents and has taken this action to protect its intellectual property rights,'' the company said in a statement.

Three of the patents are for motion control tech and a fourth for the graphics user interface. Hillcrest are the people behind motion-control tech Freespace and a graphic interface tech called Home.

Bloomberg reports that the ITC case will likely go first and can take about 15 months to be investigated.

Nintendo's Wii Faces Complaints by Hillcrest Labs [Bloomberg]

Gibson's lawsuit is a transparent end run around an impartial court that Activision asked on March 11 to rule on patent assertions that Gibson knows have no merit. Our Guitar Hero retailing partners have done nothing wrong. We will confront this and any other efforts by Gibson to wrongfully interfere with Activision's relationship with its customers and its consumers.

As Activision noted in its filing, Gibson waited three years to make its patent allegations, and only did so after it became clear that Activision was not interested in renewing its marketing and support agreement with Gibson. Activision continues to believe that Gibson's claims are disingenuous and lack any justification.

Ouch, there's nothing worse than a jilted guitar manufacturer.

Kohnke Communication's suit against Star Trek Online developer Perpetual Entertainment is "vague, uncertain, ambiguous and unintelligible" according to a recent filing made by the developer.

While lacking in the vitriol found in Kohnke's original claim, which claimed among other things that they were paid to deliver good reviews for now moth-balled MMO Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising, it does a pretty good job of denying everything without saying much at all.

Perpetual's response asks the judge to toss the original suit out and force Kohnke to pay for their attorneys' fees after outlining why none of Kohnke's 13 claims have any substance. So boring, I was hoping for more dirt on the whole delivering-review-scores-for-pay issue.

PR Firm Dishes on Influence over Reviews in Suit [Kotaku]

It looks like the shoe is on the other foot, or maybe it just dropped, I always confuse my metaphors. Game Politics is reporting that Take-Two is suing Jack Thompson claiming, among other things, that his previous actions have essentially set Jack up as a "private attorney general on behalf of the State of Florida."

The suit is seeking to preemptively stop Thompson's likely complaint against Take-Two's upcoming Grand Theft Auto. It also seeks to recover their attorney fees and other costs incurred in the pending legal action. That's right, they're suing Jack and they want him to pay for it. Nice.

I'm still shocked Jack hasn't been sued for defamation or harassment. I hear his family, aka wife, has super deep pockets.

BREAKING: Take Two Sues Jack Thompson over Manhunt 2, GTA4 [Game Politics]

Update: While the story is true, it is tragically dated. This actually happened back in March.

Silicon Knights is suing Epic Games alleging that the developer's Unreal Engine 3 code is inadequate and has "caused serious damage to not only Silicon Knights, but a number of other developers in the industry," GameDaily Biz reports.

Epic Games' Vice President Mark Rein sent out a press release this afternoon notifying some gaming press of the suit:

"This morning we were served with a lawsuit by Silicon Knights. We believe the claims against us are unfounded and without merit and we intend to fully defend against them," said Rein.

"We'd love to tell you more about it but unfortunately our lawyers want us to save our comments for the courthouse so we're going to do our best to comply with their wishes. In that vein we'd appreciate if our friends in the industry and media would refrain from asking us about the suit because we're only going to say 'no comment.' We just wanted to share the news directly before the rumor mill starts churning."

Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack then responded to inquiries from GameDaily about the suit:

"We stand behind everything in our complaint and believe it is highly unfortunate that Epic forced us into this situation. We would rather spend our time focusing on making great games, but as stated in our complaint, Epic simply refuses to acknowledge the inadequacies of the Unreal Engine 3 code it provides to its licensees," he said, "and refuses to accept the fact that its code has caused serious damage not only to Silicon Knights, but a number of other developers in the industry. We look forward to successful resolution of our claims in this court proceeding."

This flurry of legal activity comes on the heels of Too Human's surprise no show at last week's E3. At the time Dyack said the reason for the no show was because the event wasn't right for the game, but now you've got to wonder if there are other issues.

Shoe, meet other foot.

GamePolitics sends word that Take-Two, in an effort to preemptively stop Jack Thompson's insane and completely baseless attacks on the company and their games, is sueing the attorney.

In the complaint Take-Two says that Thompson has a history of making threats of legal action and has done so again with Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV.

The suit alleges that Thompson's public nuisance tactic essentially violates Take Two's First Amendment rights. Lawyers for the game publisher argue that the Florida statute under which Thompson is seeking to have the games declared as nuisances essentially makes the controversial lawyer "a private attorney general on behalf of the State of Florida."

I think Thompson is slowly working his way toward the super douche achievement, just five more frivolous suits to go and it unlocks for him. Brian Crecente

Breaking: Take-Two Sues Jack Thompson [Game Politics]

Microsoft says the verdict, concerning MP3 encoding and decoding via Windows Media Player, is "unsupported by the law or the facts."

The finding is part of a larger suite of suits that also involve speech coding and the video coding used in the Xbox 360. I wonder if this could this have an impact on Microsoft's push to roll out IPTV and their current video on demand download service? Brian Crecente

Jury finds against Microsoft in $1.5B patent dispute with Alcatel-Lucent [AP]

Talk about a day late and a dollar short, New York-based company Paltalk has filed suit against Microsoft for allegedly infringing on two of their patents in the creation of Xbox Live.

According to Ars Technica, which actually read through the complaint, there's little to no detail about how exactly Microsoft is infringing on Paltalk, though the company does point to two patents, 523 and 686, both of which involve server-group messaging.

As Ars Technica so very rightfully points out, even if Msoft lost the suit, they're not going to can Live. Instead the company would probably just pony up the cash. Brian Crecente

Microsoft sued over Xbox Live [Ars Technica]

More EA unrest is brewing, this time in sunny, anti-union Florida where an interface artist for the gaming giant has filed a suit, Game Politics is reporting. Tam Su, who worked at Tiburon Studios on NFL Street and NASCAR: Chase for the Cup 2005, is claiming that EA violated the federal Fair Labor Standards ACT by not paying him overtime. Last week, Su s lawyers filed to have the claim turned into a class action for all EA employees in Florida with the job title of assistant artist or associate artist.

This all came about around the same time that EA reached a $15.6 million settlement in the California class-action. Another California class-action remains active.

Man, EA needs to just sit down with their people and work some stuff out. Open dialogue, that s what s needed here. Open dialogue and overtime pay.

Florida is Venue for Yet Another EA Class-Action Suit [Game Politics]