Microsoft sued over Xbox Live
Company could be forced to settle out of court on a case Sony has already conceded to
A court case in which Microsoft is accused of patent infringement with its Xbox Live service may soon reach a conclusion. Reports predict the hardware manufacturer could be on the verge of following suit with Sony - sued by the same people over its PSN service - and settling out of court.
The two claimants, Peter Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum, claim both Sony and Microsoft have infringed a patent they filed back in 1994 for "communicating live while playing the same videogame in separate locations".
The case was brought against the hardware makers in 2004 and, in April of this year, Sony settled with the pair out of court for an undisclosed sum.
While Microsoft has made attempts to stall the case by holding up proceedings for five weeks over a typing mistake in one legal document, and dropping 140,000 documents on Hochstein and Tenenbaum with no index, the case, as detailed over at Patent Arcade, is now under way.