Judge rules in Sony's favor in $500m controller lawsuit

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 favor.

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'.

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 favor 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 judgment 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 favor of Nintendo, however the Court of Appeals reversed this decision back in 2022. As such, this particular lawsuit is still ongoing.