The hottest new electronic product to hit stores in the United States has been the Sony PlayStation Portable, which went on sale last Thursday in a blaze of publicity, midnight launches and long queues.
But Sony has now been ordered by a US court to halt sales of its PlayStation consoles in the United States and pay $90.7 million in damages to a California technology company, Immersion Corporation.
The order will have little immediate effect on US sales of the PlayStation, which integrates games, music, films, communication and wireless networking.
For a start, the ban does not come into effect - in the US or in other countries - while Sony appeals against the court ruling in favour of Immersion Corp, a Silicon Valley developer of digital touch technologies.
Meanwhile, the one million hand-held PlayStations which went on sale last week in the US at $250 each have almost all been snapped up. A spokesman at J&R, a big Manhattan electronics store, said yesterday that they had sold all the units provided by Sony and did not know when they would be resupplied.
The court order was "regrettable", a Sony spokesman said in New York.
The company would like to start appeal procedures immediately and would be arguing that it had not committed any (patent) infringement, the spokesman said.
In its ruling, the federal court in Oakland, California, ordered Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Entertainment America to stop selling PlayStation and PlayStation 2 game consoles using Dualshock controllers, as well as more than 40 game software products, in the US. Immersion filed the lawsuit against the two Sony units last September, arguing that the Japanese electronics giant had infringed on the technology Immersion developed and patented.
It also named Microsoft Corporation as a defendant in the lawsuit, but the Seattle company, which makes the Xbox game console, settled out of court by signing a licensing agreement with the company.
The court finding is a major blow to Sony, which had been stepping up production of its PlayStation Portables to meet forecasts of three million sales in the US and Europe by the end of March.
Sony is the product leader in home video-game machines, but the console market has been dominated by Nintendo, which launched its DS console in December, featuring a touch-sensitive double screen.
