Sony’s 3-year legal battle with Immersion Corp, a small Californian tech firm that specializes in vibrating gamepads, came to a head 2 days ago, when a federal judge ruled that Sony was infringing an Immersion copyright with their dual-shock controllers. Sony has been ordered to stop selling PS1 and PS2 units with said dual-shock controllers, as well as some 40 game titles. The payout amounts to a little less than 2% of Sony’s total earnings from PS1 and PS2 sales, which admittedly isn’t much. However the court also granted Immersion a license on the dual-shock technology, which Sony must pay for as long as dual-shock-related sales continue. US$90M is more than four times the annual revenue of Immersion Corp (just a little over US$20M) but is far less than their original target of US$299M when the case was first brought forth in 2002.
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Big Payout: Sony Fined US$90M
27 Mar 2005Leave a Reply