News: LG seeks to halt PS3 sales

An ongoing legal battle between Sony and LG over certain patent rights is continuing in the United States, with LG recently hitting back and trying to stop the sale of several Sony products in the US, including the PlayStation 3 console.

According to Bloomberg, LG claims that Sony's high definition TVs (such as the Sony Bravia) infringe on four of its patents, while products outfitted with Blu-ray players (the PS3 among them), violate four more.

The retaliatory strike comes in the light of Sony’s claims that LG was infringing on some of its patents relating to mobile phones. The Japanese consumer giant brought a case to the US International Trade Commission (ITC) on 28 December.

The phones named by Sony include the Lotus Elite, Neon, Remarq, Rumor 2 and Xenon. Sony also filed a civil lawsuit targeting LG's Blu-ray disc players.

The ITC has the power to ban the import of products into the United States if they judge those products violate patent rights. Sony and LG both make more than 20% of its revenue from the US alone, so an import block for either company could spell disaster.

In the case of the high definition TVs, the patents relate to HD receivers and how they receive and process signals. The Blu-ray patent infringements relate to dealing with multiple data streams as well as a system to reproduce data stored on read-only devices.

It is unclear how long the fist flinging between South Korean LG and Japanese Sony is going to continue, but being respectively the second and third largest TV manufacturers in the world puts more than a bit of money on the table.

LG seeks to halt PS3 sales

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