Florian Mueller, who has been working as an activist and patent analyst for over 20 years, decided to take a look at Sony’s recent activities – the corporation confirmed work on a new controller that can positively affect the gameplay of players and, for example, “emulate temperatures”.
The specialist on his blog Foss Patents noticed that Sony in the documentation openly criticizes competitors’ devices, describing them as “worse”.
According to Sony, the new equipment could be used with PCs, PlayStation consoles, but also “on a home entertainment system from a different, albeit inferior manufacturer.” Implicitly, the company claims that Nintendo or Microsoft equipment is inferior to PlayStation.
[Sprzęt mógłby być używany z – przy. red.] personal computers, home entertainment systems (e.g. Sony PlayStation 2 or Sony PlayStation 3 or Sony PlayStation 4), handheld gaming devices (e.g. Sony PSP or Sony Vita) or a third-party home entertainment system.
Florian Mueller informs that if a smaller company defined its inventions in this way, it would not immediately receive permission to register the device. In the patent documentation itself, you can emphasize the better specification of the equipment, but in this situation Sony simply criticizes the competition’s devices:
It’s amazing that no one discovered this ‘tradition’ beforehand and that no patent office told them long ago to stop doing it once and for all. Patent applications are not intended to be propaganda instruments for console warriors.
In this context, there is nothing wrong with discussing the specific technical disadvantages (such as poorer performance, higher power consumption, higher memory requirements) of earlier, but calling competitors generally ‘inferior’ is disinterested, stupid, childish and unprofessional. Even if these manufacturers were inferior, that would not mean that any invention that a given Sony patent purports to cover – here the ‘universal controller’ – is by definition innovative and worthy of patent protection.
It should certainly be added that Florian Mueller is one of Microsoft’s clients, and in the years 1995-1998 he worked with Blizzard, but even in this situation the specialist emphasizes Sony’s interesting activities.
