Sony successfully defends controller patent lawsuit in court

Sony has won a legal battle initiated by Genuine Enabling technology (GET) which accused the PlayStation maker of infringing one of its controller technology patents. At the time of filing, Sony’s most recent console would have been the PlayStation 4.

As reported Gamesindustry.bizThe lawsuit originally filed in 2017 by GET sought $500 million (around £395 million) in damages, accusing Sony of infringing a patent titled “Method and apparatus for producing a combined data stream and recovering from therefrom the respective user input stream and at least one input signal.

GET had accused Sony of infringing the patent primarily because of the way PlayStation controllers communicate with the console. In this case, this would amount to adopting a “slowly varying” frequency for traditional button inputs, with a higher frequency being implemented for motion-based controls. GET had argued that no controller or device could do this until its patent was created.

In response, Sony argued that GET was unable to provide proof that its technology was “structurally equivalent” to any component found in PlayStation devices.

The judge presiding over the case now agrees with Sony, thus closing the case and stating that GET had “raised no dispute of fact” and concluding that Sony had not infringed the company’s patent .

This isn’t the only lawsuit GET has filed against a major gaming hardware maker. Reuters report details that GET also has a lawsuit pending against Nintendo regarding the same patent. While the courts ruled in favor of Nintendo in this case in 2020, the game has since been reopened in 2022 and has yet to come to fruition.

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