Laws of Play

Sony’s PS3 in legal trouble… again?

Parallel Processing, a Newport Beach, Calif. branch of New Bedford, Mass.’s International Parallel Machines, has flipped Sony over and attacked its weak point for massive damage. According to a complaint filed by Parallel Processing in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Sony’s Cell Processor, which is the main processor in its PLAYSTATION 3 video game console, infringes upon US Patent no. 5,056,000, a 1991 patent for “synchronized parallel processing with shared memory.”

Parallel Processing’s patent in question has never before been fully utilized in a consumer application because it was deemed too difficult to write applications that take full advantage of the processor, a complaint commonly heard around the PS3’s launch.¹ Instead, parallel processing technology prior to the introduction of the PS3 was generally only utilized in supercomputers.

Parallel Processing alleges that Sony’s introduction of the Cell Processor into the PLAYSTATION 3 has caused “irreparable harm” and, as a result, the company seeks damages, reimbursement of legal fees, interest, and “the impounding and destruction of all [Sony's] products that infringe the [patent].” (hyperlink added)

For more info, see: Destructoid
Next-Gen
EDN

1. Other developers, however, have also alleged that the PS3 is far easier to work with than originally thought. [↩]