It seems that Sony and Nintendo are being sued for using a patent that they did not get approval for.
The patent in question is regarding how peripherals will synchronize with their consoles.
The company sueing Nintendo and Sony is Copper Innovations Group, who had filed a patent back in 1996.
Read more about the issue at Mygen.
Here’s the comment I wrote in Seekingalpha regarding the genius of Xbox 360 and what I thought was an interesting question to what disc format Microsoft will start supporting now that Hd-Dvd is nearly dead.
As a PS3 fan, I agree with everyone that Microsoft’s Xbox360 needs improvements.
What the author, Bruce, is talking about is the guts of the system; the components built are relatively cheap compared to the innards of a PS3.
Microsoft is also the king of bringing back a product, newly improved. Who would have thought that Windows would have succeeded with the first launch and all its faults?
Microsoft actually listens to it’s customers and uses that information to improve their products. I don’t doubt that a future Xbox 720/1080 will really give Sony a run for their money.
I think it’s going to be a fun gamble to see what Microsoft will do about future games that will need larger disc space. Microsoft has been supporting the Hd-Dvd system but with Blu-ray all but having won the movie market, Hd-Dvd will be dieing out. Will Microsoft start supporting the Blu-ray format by it’s competitor Sony?
The only way for HD-Dvd to last a while longer, at this point, is to become a burning solution for PC users.
PC users will always need larger discs to hold all the data that they accumulate. With Blu-ray burners available and no Hd-DVD burners yet that I have seen, even this might be a hard battle…
So what do you think?
Ahh, if only Johnny Depp’s character, Captain Jack Sparrow, only knew about Sony’s plans for a treasure hunt…
The game Sony had envisioned was a pager based system, in which you would receive information on your pager and you would then go on a quest to find the location, respond back, and get information to head to another locations until you reach the end.
Read the PDF for the Sony Patent.
The game which some of you might say is similar to Geocaching might find it interesting to note that Sony had applied for the patent back in 1997 and received approval in Aug. 1999.
Wikipedia shows that the creation of the Geacaching game was created on May. 03, 2000.
What’s truly more interesting is the mention of Letterboxing, which used references to landmarks and clues embedded into stories which is 150 years old!