Judge Rules in Sony’s Favour in $500m Controller Comms Lawsuit

A US judge has ruled that Sony did not infringe on another company’s patented technology with its PlayStation hardware, specifically in regard to how consoles and controllers communicate.

As detailed by GamesIndustry.biz, Genuine Enabling Technology (GET) first filed a complaint against Sony back in 2017, claiming that the PlayStation maker had infringed on its ‘730 Patent, entitled ‘Method and Apparatus for Producing a Combined Data Stream and Recovering Therefrom the Respective User Input Stream and at Least One Input Signal.’

Amongst the many claims levelled in the case, a central point was how PlayStation consoles and controllers connect. Now, as we all know, the DualSense communicates with the PS5 by submitting a separate signal on a “slow-varying frequency” for button inputs and another, higher-frequency signal for motion control input. GET’s assertion was that no device was simultaneously capable of receiving both signals until it solved the problem with its ‘730 Patent.