Nintendo, Sony Face Controller Lawsuit

Copper Innovation Group claims both companies have stolen its technology for differentiating signals from multiple controllers.

Less than a year after finally ending its legal tussle with Immersion over rumble technology patents in controllers, Sony has once again found itself in hot water over controller patents, and this time Nintendo is right alongside on the hot seat. According to Ars Technica, Copper Innovation Group has slapped both companies with a lawsuit claiming they infringed on a patent it holds for a “Hand held computer input apparatus and method.”

This time around, it isn’t rumble technology in dispute, but the relatively humdrum way that the system is able to tell each controller’s communications apart. According to the 1996 patent, “Every transmitter unit has a unique hardware encoded identifying number. When power is first applied to the transmitter, for example when batteries are first inserted, the identifying number is read and stored in Random Access Memory (RAM) in the transmitter. All subsequent communications sent from that transmitter will contain that identifier.” This is the aspect of its patent that Copper claims both Nintendo and Sony have infringed upon with their own controllers.

Copper filed the suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania in December. It seeks damages, plus interest, legal fees, and an injunction that would prevent Sony and Nintendo from continuing to sell controllers using this technology.