Sony describes Microsoft and Nintendo as inferior in a number of patent applications – and has been for years!
A newly released Sony patent describes Microsoft and Nintendo’s “home entertainment consoles” as “inferior” to their own products, like GameRant discovered.
Florian Müller continued to research and dealt extensively with the topic. In doing so, he found out and documented with a number of entries that for more than a decade Sony has been naming Microsoft and Nintendo as “inferior manufacturers
Dozens of examples have been made since 2011 listedwhich proves that this is a long-standing practice of Sony.
Again and again Sony mentions “other, albeit inferior manufacturers‘ in relation to competing video game consoles.
Florian Müller reports: “It is common and legitimate in patent applications to explain why the claimed invention is superior to the prior art (ie the technology existing at the time of the patent application). In this context, it is not out of place to discuss certain technical disadvantages (e.g. lower performance, higher power consumption, larger memory requirements) of certain earlier inventions.”
“But generally speaking of competitors as ‘inferior’ is baseless, stupid, childish and unprofessional. Even if these manufacturers were inferior, that would not mean that the invention that a particular Sony patent purports to describe – here a “universal controller” – is by definition innovative and worthy of patent protection.”
“Sony is obviously the kind of client that a lot of patent attorneys want. If a small company went to the same patent attorneys and asked them to file patent specifications containing such an egregious passage, most patent attorneys would refuse to put their name on it.”
“If Sony wants to do comparative advertising, it can do that elsewhere. Gamers will not base their purchasing decisions on the wording used by Sony in its patent filings.”
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“The list shows that Sony has been doing this systematically for more than a decade. It has nothing to do with pride in invention. It’s just idiotic.”