Immersion famously sued Sony and Microsoft in 2002 over various vibration functions in their controllers, a suit which Microsoft settled and Sony fought for five years before eventually bowing to Immersion's patent claims. Now, it appears that a patent case with an odd symmetry to the Immersion one is heating up, according to Patent Arcade [thanks Kotaku]
Peter Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum patented a method for "communicating live while playing the same video game in separate locations" in 1994. The two men then sued Microsoft and Sony for Xbox Live and the PS2's online network; Sony settled the case in April 2009, but Microsoft is still fighting against it.
Microsoft has been chastised by the court a couple of times during this case, once for filing an objection over a single typo and later by submitting 140,000 documents to Hochstein without any index, causing the court the ask Microsoft to explain why its counsel shouldn’t be sanctioned “for unreasonably and vexatiously multiplying the proceedings.”
It'll be interesting to see how this case turns out, though considering the legal flimflam that Microsoft's lawyers have already pulled, it sounds like they're just trying to buy time, and that's not a good sign for Microsoft's case.
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