The U.S. International Trade Commission has announced that it will be investigating possible patent infringements related to Blu-ray players and peripherals, and that Sony was one of 30 companies that are included in the probe.
The probe began because of a complaint filed in February by Columbia University Professor Emeritus Gertrude Neumark Rothschild who claims that short-wavelength light-emitting diodes and laser diodes used in Blu-ray players infringe her patent.
Other notable companies besides Sony in the investigation are Nokia, Motorola Inc, LG Electronics Inc, and Panasonic maker Matsushita Electric Industrial.
Sony spokespeople refused comment as the investigation is ongoing. We will keep you updated.
Result for: spokespeople
Sony’s videogame unit, sometimes known as the “PlayStation” unit, has announced that it is expecting to see its losses shrink by about $956 million USD for the 12 months ended March 31, 2008. Because of PlayStation 3 start-up costs , the previous 12 month period had seen the division lose about $1.43 billion USD.
The figures are according to the Japanese Nikkei daily and the whole corporation is expected to see its operating profit increase five fold. Even with that growth however, the corporation is expected to miss its profit targets.
The January forecast was $3.91 billion USD but the Nikkei predicts that the company will only see a $3.63 billion profit, far below its estimate.
Sales of TVs and digital cameras were very strong for the year and official full year earnings will be released next week. Sony spokespeople said they would not comment on the Nikkei’s report.
Result for: spokespeople
According to the Associated Press it seems that Comcast is not the only company guilty of throttling P2P traffic, Singapore’s StarHub, and Cox Communications were equal offenders as well.
Comcast has been seen as the main offender for the last few months and saw backlash from net neutrality advocates, customers and the even the FCC. The AP however, says that a worldwide study of 8,175 Internet users, showed that 3 companies were indeed blocking the traffic, and that Cox was likely the worst offender.
Of the 151 Cox subscribers, 82 had their transfers blocked, read the survey. The Cox interference however, was different than that of Comcast. Cox only blocked seeding of a file downloaded through BitTorrent, thus reducing the amount of people the downloader can share the file with.
Cox’s subscriber agreement does state that subscribers are signing up for “protocol filtering,” meaning that the company “prioritizes some forms of Internet traffic over others,” but spokespeople have said that BitTorrent is not particularly discriminated against.
