Sony loses massive infringement court case on controllers

[Julius Seeker]

Immersion Corporation of San Jose, CA, is a leader in developing, licensing, and marketing digital touch technology and products.

Founded in 1993, Immersion's technology is deployed across automotive, entertainment, medical training, mobility, personal computing, and three-dimensional simulation markets. Immersion's patent portfolio includes over 500 issued or pending patents in the U.S. and other countries.

In 2003, Sony and Microsoft were sued by Immersion for patent infringement for the use of vibration functions in their gaming controllers. Immersion's lead attorney in this case was Morgan Chu. While Microsoft settled out of court, Sony continued to defend the case. Sony lost, and has been required to pay considerable royalties to Immersion and suspend the sale of the controllers, including all PlayStation and PlayStation 2 console packages containing them. Sony has appealed this decision and will be able to sell its products while the case is under appeal. On March 12, 2006 Sony lost the appeal.

-Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_Corporation



- Sony loses the patent infringement verdict to Immersion on vibrating game controllers. The company may need to pay over $90.7 million and up to 5% quarterly revenue from PlayStation sales to Immersion after the lawsuit concluded later this month.

-The Magicbox

[Imakeholesinu]

Holy god....what a blow.

[Nev]

Yeah, the $90.7M is probably not that much for Sony as a whole, but requiring 5% of console sales sucks ass for them.

I doubt it will hurt them that badly, but I bet they're not happy about it at all.

[Kupek]

Getting a patent for combining a vibrator with a videogame controller is ridiculous, but nothing can be done about that now.

[Nev]

Agreed with Kup on that, but the patent may have been more substantial than that - who knows, we weren't given the details. Hard to see how a controller's single feature warrants revenues from all system sales, though.

Forcing them to halt production on games and controllers would just be retarded in the extreme, however, and would hurt the industry badly.

At least they can keep selling while the appeal is in the process of going forward. But it seems like it would make more sense to just grant part of the royalties of controller sales - rather than the whole damn system - to Immersion, instead of all this.

[Zeus]

Getting a patent for combining a vibrator with a videogame controller is ridiculous, but nothing can be done about that now.

RIM is having the same issues with NTP regarding Blackberry technology. Seems that the US patent laws leave a lot of leeway in terms of who owns what, forcing the courts to hand out settlement suits in what normal, sane human beings would deem as ridiculous claims

[Nev]

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like patent law needs a rewrite to reflect the quicker pace of technology...

Having a software patent for more than two years or so seems sort of ridiculous in a lot of cases, unless truly significant amounts of money went into the development of the technique or algorithm. Hardware patents could conceivably need longer time periods, but this does seem pretty absurd, and it does seem retarded to patent the idea of a force-feedback controller, as opposed to a specific technology.

[Julius Seeker]

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like patent law needs a rewrite to reflect the quicker pace of technology...

Having a software patent for more than two years or so seems sort of ridiculous in a lot of cases, unless truly significant amounts of money went into the development of the technique or algorithm. Hardware patents could conceivably need longer time periods, but this does seem pretty absurd, and it does seem retarded to patent the idea of a force-feedback controller, as opposed to a specific technology.

It is the specific design, which is why Nintendo (who first began using rumble features on their controllers) and other third party companies were not sued.

This is just another case where a small company wins against a corporate giant who took one of their designs. Well, at least now we know why Sony seems to be changing their controller for the next system.

[Nev]

Again, I don't know all the details. If Sony *did* steal technology (or just tried to use someone else's without recompense), then, well, they pretty much deserve what they're getting.

In developing our game, we are having to sidestep around the "Inventions Agreement" that my business partner, who still works with JAMDAT/EA, has in effect with them. It's a very grey-area sort of legal document that, in the broadest sense, could mean that any work he does in any JAMDAT/EA-related business area (including our game) automatically belongs to them. We're distancing ourselves from it in various legal ways, but the idea that a company may have the legal right to basically usurp someone else's work is one of the shittier thoughts I've had to deal with.

Maintaining a large company in good financial health is no picnic, I'm sure, and I get irked when people think that corporations have unlimited funds or finances - they are ultimately made of people, mostly like any other people, who have budgets to run and things to be sold. However, I know for a fact that a small company IS a bitch to try to run and keep afloat, and the statistics state that more small companies go under than big ones. When a large, established corporation usurps a small corporation's work without payment, that is not good for business on a number of levels, and I have a hard time feeling badly if the large company gets nailed with some non-trivial consequences as a result.

I do still think that halting the sale of controllers, systems, and games seems excessive at this point, though.

[Kupek]

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like patent law needs a rewrite to reflect the quicker pace of technology...

Having a software patent for more than two years or so seems sort of ridiculous in a lot of cases, unless truly significant amounts of money went into the development of the technique or algorithm. Hardware patents could conceivably need longer time periods, but this does seem pretty absurd, and it does seem retarded to patent the idea of a force-feedback controller, as opposed to a specific technology.

My main complaint is the Patent Office's low standard for "novel." A patent is only supposed to be granted for devices, techniques or practices that are novel. Things like combining two known devices, or in the case of Amazon, for simply reckognizing a user and storing their purchase info, are not novel. They are obvious extensions of existing technology.

[Zeus]

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like patent law needs a rewrite to reflect the quicker pace of technology...

Having a software patent for more than two years or so seems sort of ridiculous in a lot of cases, unless truly significant amounts of money went into the development of the technique or algorithm. Hardware patents could conceivably need longer time periods, but this does seem pretty absurd, and it does seem retarded to patent the idea of a force-feedback controller, as opposed to a specific technology.

I think it's more the fact that what they're patenting is so broad that if someone somewhere creates something similar, even without knowledge of the other creation, they can get sued and win. Really, it's it THAT hard to have rumble feature that acts the way the Sony stuff does? Does it take a superstar engineer 3 years to come up with it? Not really and it's not out of the realm of possibility that two companies can do it relatively similarly.

There's no word that Sony actually worked with this company or even looked into what they were doing, so I blame the way the laws are set up more than anything else. Same thing with the RIM vs NTP case that RIM has to pay something like $600+ million for

[Julius Seeker]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30269

I guess Sony infringed on two patents. I couldn't find any detailed information, but I have a question of why Nintendo, the first company to use vibrating controllers, was not sued? My guess is that they probably had begun developing the feature, or had a product already readily available before the patent was filed. Perhaps it has something to do with the specific type of motor used. Sega also used them in their arcade machines, which may have got them off the hook as well.

I do not think that patenting vibrating controllers is unfair, when the patent was filed it was during a time when people (even most on this site) were saying that it was just a gimmicky function anyways when Starfox first used it.

Are patents on DVD and Blu-Ray technology unfair as well?

Hey, perhaps patents shouldn't exist at all. It would make things much easier for a lot of people.

[Zeus]

Are patents on DVD and Blu-Ray technology unfair as well?

If the patent read "using a laser of any colours of the spectrum to transfer data to and from of a form of media" then yes, it would be. That was my point, I think that it ambiguity like this (although likely not to that level of generality) that allows suits like this or the one against RIM to go through.