Sony has won a big lawsuit against Genuine Enabling Technology (GET). A judge in a U.S. District Court decided that Sony’s PlayStation game consoles and controllers did not break GET’s patent. This saved Sony from possibly having to pay $500 million in damages.
The judge decided in favor of Sony (first spotted by Bloomberg Law). The Memorandum Opinion, released on March 25, 2024, stated that GET “failed to raise a dispute of fact.” Consequently, the judge granted Sony’s motion for a summary judgment of non-infringement, effectively closing the case.
In 2017, GET filed a complaint against Sony Corporation, starting a lawsuit. The case centered around GET’s U.S. Patent No. 6,219,730, titled “Method and Apparatus for Producing a Combined Data Stream and Recovering Therefrom the Respective User Input Stream and at Least One Input Signal.” This patent involves technology for transmitting multiple input signals simultaneously, such as button presses and motion control data for gaming devices.
If this sounds very general to you, you’re not the only one. It sounds basically like they’re trying to sue Sony for an idea, not the execution of the idea. For those who don’t know, you can’t patent an idea. You patent the execution of the idea (that’s why there are so many different kinds of glues and post-it notes).
The company GET claimed that PlayStation’s way of connecting its consoles and controllers violated a patented technology. They argued that PlayStation devices divided button input signals at a ‘slow-varying’ frequency while sending motion control input at a higher frequency, which mirrored the method described in the patent. According to GET, their patent offered a distinct solution for allowing devices to receive both signals at the same time.
In its defense, Sony claimed that GET did not provide enough evidence to prove infringement. Sony argued that a specific part of their PlayStation controllers was not the same as the logic diagrams in GET’s patented design. They were correct because the judge saw that GET didn’t give a good amount of evidence to claim Sony copied anything.
The victory is a big win for Sony in the world of intellectual property disputes. It’s worth noting that GET has also taken legal action against Nintendo over the same patent. Initially, the District Court ruled in favor of Nintendo in 2020, but the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the decision in 2022, and the case is ongoing.
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