Judge rules in Sony’s favour in $500m controller lawsuit

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Image credit: Sony

Sony has successfully won a patent infringement lawsuit in which it was being sued for $500m, after a US District Court judge ruled in the PlayStation company’s favour.

The lawsuit was based on Sony’s controller-to-console communication method, with Genuine Enabling Technology – a company with a history of lawsuits over technology patents – seeking $500m in damages. GET initially filed a complaint against the company back in 2017, claiming Sony had infringed on its patent.

Specifically, this patent was entitled ‘Method and Apparatus for Producing a Combined Data Stream and Recovering Therefrom the Respective User Input Stream and at Least One Input Signal’.

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Sony subsequently said the company had not given enough evidence to support its claims that a component in its PlayStation controllers was “structurally equivalent” to diagrams featured in GET’s patent.

Now, a judge has ruled in favour of Sony, as reported by Eurogamer’s sister-site GamesIndustry.biz. In a Memorandum Opinion seen by GI.biz, earlier this week the judge in question said GET had “failed to raise a dispute of fact”. As a result of this finding, they granted the platform holder’s request for a summary judgement of non-infringement, declaring the case closed.

As GI.biz noted, this is not the first time GET has tried to file this kind of lawsuit.

It has also filed a similar complaint against Nintendo. Initially, a judge ruled in favour of Nintendo, however the Court of Appeals reversed this decision back in 2022. As such, this particular lawsuit is still ongoing.