PS5 Faceplate Seller Cancels All Orders Following 'Legal Action from Sony' (videogameschronicle.com) 46
A peripheral company selling custom PS5 faceplates has been forced to cancel all its orders and pull the products from sale, following reported legal action from Sony. From a report: PlateStation5.com had already been forced to rebrand to CustomizeMyPlates.com following a complaint from Sony earlier this week, but now the seller claims that subsequent threats to go to court over the custom faceplates have forced it to stop selling the product entirely. "Before we launched, we did our due diligence and were of the opinion, that because Sony only had pending patents on the faceplates there would be no problem," CustomizeMyPlates told VGC via e-mail. "But after only a day of our website being live, Sony's lawyers asked us to change our name (at the time PlateStation5), due to trademark infringements. We thought this switch would be enough to keep everyone happy, and honestly were hoping so since we were already underway with our product development. "But then Sony's lawyers told us it was their opinion, Sony's intellectual property extended to the faceplates, and that if we continued to sell and distribute them in any country, we would end up in court." It added: "This all came to light yesterday and we are now cancelling and refunding all faceplate orders worldwide... we are extremely disappointed about this but we have no other option."
Really Sony?!? (Score:2)
Is it going to hurt your bottom line to have someone manufacture a faceplate for your product?
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Go back in time ~12 years and see how many people were buying replacement face-plates for their cell phones. The iPhone more or less killed that market, but it was highly profitable. Look over the last 10 for the plastic shells on laptops to either block out the Apple logo or just change the color. Your username is aptly chosen!
Re:Really Sony?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people invest so much time and energy (and a lot of times a lot of money too) on other peoples IP?
The entire country of China would like a word with you.
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Here is a weird example [geekologie.com] (SFW).
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How else will they sell overpriced branded controllers and PS5s?
Re:Really Sony?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
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sony owns the rights to making the p s 5 face plate.
what i do not understand is why CustomizeMyPlates.com could not reverse engineer the face plate to look like something else.
that to me is lack of reverse marketing engineering skills.
so i ask CustomizeMyPlates.com.
why does the sony face plate have to look like a sony face plate
Re:The problem is the name, not the part (Score:4, Informative)
There's thousands of 3rd party verndors that make knock-off/cusmizable, drop-in parts for other people's products. That's perfectly legal.
Ripping off the corporate name, however, that's gonna get you in hot water.
Didn't even make it to the second line of the summary.
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He still read part of it though, that's more than what most people do.
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Its not about right and wrong. Sony easily has enough money to sink PlateStation5.com with legal problems. Even if PlateStation5.com wins every time they still need the operating capital to pull it off - and then the business is about fighting Sony and there is a lot less time to make face plates. PlateStation5.com decided not to fight Sonyzilla, if it was your money you might make the same choice.
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I read it completely.
They just need to pick a name that won't piss Sony off.
They changed the name; Sony are still pissed off. So they clearly need to do more than "just" pick a new name.
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If they had called their website "CustomizeMyPlates.com" from the start, Sony probably wouldn't have even noticed their existence.
Instead, they got Sony's attention by choosing the catchy-sounding URL "PlateStation5.com" - at that point they were screwed, and changing their URL or company name wasn't going to cut the ice.
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It probably made them a primary target, but yeah, Sony's gonna be selling these things like Hotplates.
LawyerStation5.com (Score:1)
Extremely disappointed (Score:2)
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These wouldn't have. Maybe a skin (Score:2)
Apparently these wouldn't have made it any less ugly.
You can still get a skin, though.
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Why would you be staring at the console instead of playing games?
Patent Pending (Score:3)
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I don't agree with Sony's decisions here, I think it's silly, but seriously - your legal opinion was "they only have a patent pending so you can do what you want"? What grade school lawyer told you that one?
Well you can't be successfully sued for infringing a pending patent. The question is how quickly you stop once the patent is granted. But honestly it sounds more like these guys were scared to go to court in the first place, so yeah they did get some really dumb legal advice.
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They can't afford to go to court with Sony in the first place.
They should have picked a different name.
Not surprised at all (Score:5, Informative)
This is a company that was willing to 'rootkit' the computer of every customer who purchased one of their music CDs.
This is a company that let detailed info on 77M of their customers loose in the wild.
This is a company that can't even be bothered to secure their own servers to protect their own nasty internal communications.
Sony has demonstrated how little regard it has for its customers, its stars, etc.. No reason to expect any more regard for other businesses.
Prior to that first misdeed, I had a lot of Sony stuff. I haven't knowingly bought anything Sony (or watched one of their in house movies or bought their CDs) since. I do realize that there are Sony components inside of other devices I buy but I can't do much about that...
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Re: Not surprised at all (Score:2)
My last console was the PS3, which was such a pain requiring installs and updates and downloads and stuff that I just did not want my console to be doing. I wanted to put a game in and play it, immediately. I could not even play a different game while updates were downloading.
Lesson was learned and I became a permanent PC gamer after that. At least on a
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Revenge (Score:5, Interesting)
Release the 3D files for the plates so everyone can 3D-print their own.
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Since we're talking about something that's probably only a few millimetres thick, it's shouldn't take more than a day to print each half.
Not "Forced" (Score:1)
The company is run by a bunch of weak-willed namby-pamby "bend me over and pass the KY" types.
The article is completely misleading.
Sony #evilcorp (Score:1)
Textbook racketeering right there. (Score:1)
"Intellectual property" is a crime scheme. Nothing else.
Why (Score:1)
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Because you can. Some have their favourite game, which they play all day long. When they then can get some decor or LED lights or whatever to show their enthusiasm then they should be allowed to.
By the way, this whole issue shows how superficial Sony has become. It's one thing for a kid wanting to alter looks of their favourite game or toy, but it's a problem when a company starts to express their "opinions and feelings" and then threatens with court those who enable kids to get a bit more out of their game
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Doing something better like what? Like posting comments on Slashdot?!
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call me crazy but if your playing some game,
your [sic] crazy.
why would you care about the face plate ?
There are those times you're not playing a game. There are load times. There is color coordination with your other decorations.
Personally I'd just take off the face plate, paint it with Krylon Fusion, and slap a decal on it. If you know how to use spray paint you can get good results this way. I painted the Sony monitor on my Sun 4/260 black using a similar recipe (I scuffed the monitor first, because Krylon Fusion didn't exist yet.) Why? Because I wanted a black monitor. No other explanati
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