Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, April 11 (Xinhua) Sony has repeatedly referred to other console makers as "shoddy manufacturers" in its patent applications, a practice that has been criticized by a patent expert. The expert believes that Sony's approach is "childish", "unprofessional" and unnecessary.

According to CTOnews.com, the patent expert, Florian Muller (Florian Mueller), wrote an article on his blog Foss Patents criticizing Sony. He cited an article by GameRant that reported that Sony recently announced a patent application for a general controller in which it called non-PlayStation products "shoddy". Muller said it was not only "stupid", but also not the first time it had been done. Sony has started this "tradition" since 2011, he said.

"surprisingly, no one has discovered this' tradition 'before, and no patent office has told them to stop doing so." He added, "Patent applications are not for publicity."

Muller explained that it is reasonable to state in some patents why inventions are superior to existing technologies, and it is also a necessary condition to prove that they should be protected by patents. "in this case, there is no problem discussing specific technical defects, such as low performance, high power consumption, and large memory footprint." "but calling competitors' inferior'is superfluous, stupid, childish and unprofessional," he said. " He added, "even if those manufacturers are bad, it doesn't mean that the inventions described by Sony-- such as the 'universal controller' here-- are necessarily innovative and worthy of patent protection."

Muller continued: "if a small company goes to the same patent lawyer and asks them to submit a patent specification containing this offensive language, most patent lawyers will refuse to sign it. If Sony wants to conduct comparative advertising, it can do so elsewhere. Gamers will not make purchase decisions based on the language Sony uses in its patent application."

He also cited more than a dozen other examples to prove that Sony also used the term "different but inferior" in other patent applications. "this is just a sample, and there are many other Sony patent applications that contain such words."

In the end, Muller said: "it's not out of the inventor's pride, it's crazy."

Muller revealed on his blog that Microsoft was one of his customers and that he had been a consultant to Blizzard for many years (between 1995 and 1998, according to his LinkedIn page). Microsoft is currently trying to buy Activision Blizzard, the parent company of Blizzard, which could affect Muller's view.

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