Florian Mueller of FOSSPatents has made a surprising discovery about Sony’s behavior when it comes to their competitors.
As Mueller has pointed out in his blog, Sony has been filing patents for years that refer to their competitors, including but not limited to fellow console companies Microsoft and Nintendo, as “inferior”.
Mueller has tracked this practice to as far back as 2011, which is an interesting date. 2012 is the year Kaz Hirai stepped down as CEO and President of Sony Interactive Entertainment. While this practice may have started under Hirai, his successors, Andrew House, John Kodera, and Jim Ryan, have continued the practice indefinitely.
Mueller discusses the original patent that set off this search. A recent patent Sony filed for a universal remote control used this language to describe competitor’s consoles, which this remote can also control.
As Mueller explains, patents can usually use the word ‘superior’. This is in terms of explaining how the new technology is better than old technology, what specific drawbacks earlier patents had, and at what particular point they existed.
Of course, the reason this language even comes up as a point of interest is Sony has been surprisingly glib in their communications when it came to the Microsoft Activision deal. Famously, Activision’s Lulu-Cheng Meservey revealed that Sony told them they just want to block the merger.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick himself confirmed Sony’s statement to them, describing their conduct as ‘disappointing’. It seems that Sony has discreetly held their colleagues in the industry in this low regard for all this time.
Getting back to the patents, Mueller looks back at another one filed in November, for Sony to make their own NFTs and blockchain tech. Sony’s patent refers to their technology’s ability to work across products from ‘a different, albeit inferior, manufacturer.’
Mueller then lists other Sony patents, finding 13 such patents for technology that can be used in video games, all of which use ‘inferior’ when it comes to products that Sony also makes, but are made by their competitors.
The earliest of those patents, filed in August 29, 2011, can be found here. In page 9 it says this:
“The present invention may be implemented in an application that may be operable using a variety of end user devices. For example, an end user device may be a personal computer, a home entertainment system (e.g., Sony PlayStation 2 or Sony PlayStation 3), a portable gaming device (e.g., Sony PSP), or a home entertainment system of a different albeit inferior manufacturer.”
It isn’t clear why Sony has been adding this language in their communications. Of course, in the decade that the company has been doing this, essentially nobody knew about this practice. While Sony wasn’t exactly signaling this action, they knew nobody would notice, either.
The reasonable answer is not one PlayStation fans want to hear, but here goes. This seems to be the genuine company culture within Sony. Regardless of the market success of their competitors and their ideas, Sony seems to regard other companies as inferior to them.
As an interesting coda to this all, Mueller pointed out that his LinkedIn post about this story was publicly liked by patent professionals, including lawyers who have worked for Ericsson and Nintendo. So it seems there is some truth to this story after all.
This is not really the sort of thing you want to hear about from a market leader in your industry, or your preferred console company in your hobby.
But if Activision had been rattled by the sudden revelation of their attitude, perhaps we should be expecting that something like this was true about Sony after all. It’s certainly strange to think about this of the current industry frontrunner, but that seems to be where we are now.
