A judge from a US district court has ruled that Sony did not infringe on another company’s patented technology with its PlayStation consoles and controllers. The plaintiff, called Genuine Enabling Technology, filed its first lawsuit against Sony Corporation in 2017, seeking 500 million dollars in damages.
According to the website GamesIndustry.biz, Genuine Enabling Technology claimed that the platform owner had infringed their patent number 730, entitled “Method and apparatus for producing a combined data stream and retrieving from it the respective user input stream and at least one input signal.”
One of the main claims in the lawsuit refers to the way PlayStation consoles and controllers communicate with each other: specifically, they send a separate signal at a “slow-changing” frequency for button inputs and a higher frequency for motion control inputs.
Genuine Enabling Technology claimed that no device could receive both signals simultaneously until they devised a solution with their patent 730. However, Sony argued that the company had not provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that a specific component of their controllers was “structurally equivalent” to the logical diagrams exposed in the Genuine Enabling Technology patent.
The judge in the case agreed that Genuine Enabling Technology “had not raised a genuine issue of material fact” and granted Sony’s request for summary judgment of non-infringement. Furthermore, the judge declared the case closed.
Genuine Enabling Technology also filed a similar lawsuit against Nintendo for infringement of the same patent. The judge in the District Court case also ruled in favor of Nintendo in 2020, but the United States Court of Appeals overturned this decision in 2022. The case is ongoing.
