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PlayStation (Games) Sony

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."
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PS5 Faceplate Seller Cancels All Orders Following 'Legal Action from Sony'

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  • Is it going to hurt your bottom line to have someone manufacture a faceplate for your product?

    • How else will they sell overpriced branded controllers and PS5s?

    • Re:Really Sony?!? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:19PM (#60677604)
      I suspect they are working on licensed deals with companies or plan on selling their own. Still pretty stupid. Aliexpress will be filled with them soon, good luck stopping them all.
    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Sony is trying to see how many people they can make suffer by looking at the eyesore the produced for this generation. It may well be something they want to keep open for themselves if they want to.
    • with a patent pending on the face plate design.
      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
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Sell them anyway and include a complementary USB stick with Youtube-dl on it.
  • I was really hoping to be able to buy a third party faceplate to make the console look a little less fucking ugly
  • by drhamad ( 868567 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:17PM (#60677594)
    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?
    • 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.

      • 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)

    by Tangential ( 266113 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:18PM (#60677600) Homepage
    Nothing about Sony's behavior ever surprises me

    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...
    • man i had forgotten all about that cd stuff. whats great is back then "drm" was still being classified as malware. shame its not anymore.
    • Add to the list trying to sue people for showing others how to re-add functionality Sony took away from legitimately purchased products (like OtherOS)

      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
    • You dropped something... "And they are so fucking litigious that different divisions of Sony are seemingly always suing other divisions"
  • Revenge (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Monday November 02, 2020 @05:29PM (#60677664)

    Release the 3D files for the plates so everyone can 3D-print their own.

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Have you seen the size of the console, thats gonna be one heck of a big 3d printer and will take weeks ;)
      • by vyvepe ( 809573 )
        You can split bigger parts to more smaller ones and then glue them together if your 3D printer has small build area. It is easy to glue parts together precisely enough using a proper seam design.
      • 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.

  • 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.

  • Another reason not to buy stuff from Sony #evilcorp
  • "Intellectual property" is a crime scheme. Nothing else.

  • call me crazy but if your playing some game, why would you care about the face plate ?
    • 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

      • Of course Sony is superficial, but worrying about the faceplate on a console is equally stupid and superficial. Its a waste of time to fnd and buy one, time one could spend doing something better.
    • 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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