Although Nintendo really isn’t any stranger to litigation over the technology that it uses or creates for it’s products, this is a bit of an odd one. A technology company based in Japan has filed suit in the US over the patent that they applied for in 2003 and were granted in 2008 for “technology relating to displaying stereoscopic images on-screen for viewing with the naked eye, i.e., without utilizing glasses or other devices.” Tomita Technologies seems to have a very broad patent here, that doesn’t just relate to the 3DS at all, but many other devices, not the least of which are some small (And currently very expensive) TVs and some HTC devices.
But probably the strangest is that Nintendo doesn’t actually make the screens themselves, they buy them from Sharp. Of course, Nintendo is a bigger company, not that money has anything to do with!