Sony Called “Childish” by Patent Expert for Referring to Non-PlayStation Products as “Inferior” in Patent Applications

wccftech.com:

Patents in gaming usually wind up leading to some of the most recognizable forms of hardware on the market, including the DualShock controller, Xbox’s Kinect, and the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons, to name a few examples. Patents always need to have an application filed along with them, which brings us to Sony and patents pertaining to the PlayStation platform as of the past 12 years.

VGC brings this to light, revealing comments by a patent expert, Florian Mueller. Florian has been a patent analyst and activist for more than 20 years now and runs the blog Foss Patents. Mueller released a post yesterday that rips into patents Sony has filed since 2011. In reference to a GameRant article from a few days ago (as of the time of publication), Mueller clarifies that this practice has been going on for more than a decade, stating that the practice has been dating as far back as 2011.

For more than a decade, #Sony's #patent applications have been disparaging #Microsoft and #Nintendo as 'inferior manufacturer[s]' of video game consoles: gratuitous, childish, unprofessionalhttps://t.co/P2ftyIOIC0#PlayStation #Xbox #consolewarsDozens of examples since 2011.

— Florian Mueller (@FOSSpatents) April 9, 2023

Humorously enough, one such case can be seen below, where Sony refers to the competition to PlayStation as a “different albeit inferior manufacturer.” You can view the full 2011 patent this was sourced from here, and the section in question below:

Mueller also commented further, calling Sony’s wording against other companies gratuitous, stupid, childish, and unprofessional. He further added that, even if those manufacturers were inferior, it would not mean that whatever invention a given Sony patent purports to describe is, by definition,