Slashdot Mirror
PlayStation Sales Halted?
Narf Narf writes "According to Japan Today, the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California, has ordered Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and its U.S. unit to pay $90.7 million in damages to Immersion Corp. for patent infringement over controllers used with PlayStation game consoles. In the ruling handed down Thursday, the federal court also ordered Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Entertainment America Inc. to stop selling the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 game consoles using Dualshock controllers as well as more than 40 game software products." Update: 03/28 04:51 GMT by Z : ...which was followed immediately by an injunction, to allow Sony time for an appeal, and a compulsory licensing agreement.
Would it not have been easier for Sony to acquire the [Immersion Corp.] company before this mess happened?
from the you'd-think-they'd-have-thought-that-through dept.
You can say that again.
Not sure if this was because of too much confidence on Sony's end, but generally this would be the perfect example of a case worth settling out of court.
Small potatoes.
Why is slashdot posting a lawsuit of this magnitude but failing to post anything about the world famous (and more relevant) Lexar Lawsuit worth over $460 million and will cause a massive disruption in the supply/demand equations currently applied to the significantly growing flash USB key and card memory market?
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
" If this doesn't prove the US Patent system needs some overhauling, then I don't know what does. Hopefully this will get the big corporations involved in changing patent law, but for the better?"
No it just proves that:
1-Slashdotters don't read the patent.
2-Slashdotters favour a knee-jerk response.
3-Slashdotters don't care about one and two...so there, NYAH!
To sum up your quote, they didn't patent force feedback, they've patented having a sensor to make sure that your force feedback doesn't push too hard. And this is not a logical extension of force feedback because...? Just because it uses intentionally complicated language doesn't mean that the concept isn't simple.
/. rhetoric. Some of the things they've patented are obvious extensions of the existing idea, and some have just mountains of prior art. Most are of the "with X" kind of patent, where they patent pretty much daily activities "with force feedback."
That's probably not what they're fighting over, though. It's probably one of the volumes of other patents that Immersion has recieved. Let's look at a random one, shall we? 6,563,487 describes using force feedback on the D-pad of a controller. It doesn't describe how this is any different than using force feedback on a button, but there it is. There is also force feedback for a knob (6,636,197) and the terrible idea of the vibrating touchpad (6,429,846). I guess that compliments their vibrating Laptop (6,822,635).
Hey, here is one... (6,693,622) a patent for a vibrating mass inside of a controller, granted on February 17, 2004. 2004? Was the patent examiner in a cave? Every console shipped with vibrating controllers years before this, in exactly the manner they describe.
There is mounds of prior art for a lot of this. The kickback in the guns in POW. Battletech centers. The wheel feedbacks in arcade and home games such as Hard Drivin', etc, etc.
The patent system is broken. This is not just
We need to stop allowing patents of ideas, not implementations. A battery would be the perfect example of a classic patent, as one would have listed out the copper and various other ingredients that went into it, the chemical reactions that take place, and so on. These days, it would just be listed as "a device that stores electrical charge," and left at that to sue everyone who makes batteries, capacitors, carpets, combs, and anything else that happens to eventually fall under that umbrella.
Heck, they patented force feedback over a computer network (6,859,819), last month, 2005. Isn't this what cybersex was supposed to be all about? Wasn't there already teledildontics at that point?
Though maybe I'm just bitter because I work at a company which made on one of the games on the list. But these patents ring bogus to me, and I applaud Sony's efforts to fight on everybody's behalf.
I'd also like to point out that just because someone has bought a license from SCO doesn't mean SCO has the right to sell a license. Just because Nintendo didn't fight against this doesn't mean that it is valid. And quite frankly, even if it is valid and holds up in court, it's still downright questionable. I'm guessing Immersion just set the cost of licensing the patents at a number smaller than the cost of fighting the patents in court.
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