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Sony/Immersion: The Plot Thickens

The dust has long settled on the Sony/Immersion haptic feedback suit, right?

Not quite. According to a complaint filed in Thorner v. Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc., Case No. 09-01894 (NJ filed April 21, 2009), and amended recently, a witness from that case claims he was tricked into cooperating and signing away his own patent rights for a fraction of their worth.

According to the complaint, Craig Thorner was an engineer who held several patents that were also directed to haptic feedback technology, similar to those asserted by Immersion against Sony, and his patents were part of Sony's after-trial attempt to invalidate Immersion's patents.

The complaint alleges that days after the verdict against Sony, Thorner was contacted by another company that had also been targeted by Immersion. This other company, Performance Designed Products LLC (PDP), was a game distribution company, and (according to the complaint) needed Thorner's help.

Thorner claims that in working with PDP, he ended up negotiating with them to license his own patents to them, and that in that negotiation process he sought help from the same attorneys that represented Sony. According to the complaint, those attorneys helped him with the license, and they encouraged him to accept terms that were less than favorable to Thorner (including a provision that could grant a patent license to Sony, and another one accepting royalty payments that were much less than he had originally sought).

Thorner now alleges that all that time, those attorneys were actually helping Sony get a better deal out of him, and that Sony and PDP were actually working together to get that deal. He has sued them for legal malpractice, and has sued Sony for infringement of his patents.

This case is just beginning, so we will have to wait to see the other side of the story, and to see how it all turns out. Stay tuned ....

Full post as published by Patent Arcade on May 18, 2009 (boomark / email).