PlayStation's year-long war on counterfeiters
PLUS: Intriguing Subnautica 2 [redactions], what happens when a company pulls its digital sales data from the U.S.' top video game sales-tracking firm and more.
I’m back from a lovely vacation and am ready to catch up. I’ve got a bunch of things for you today, including a swathe of 2025 PlayStation lawsuits I hadn’t known about, a possibly-amusing set of redactions in one of the ongoing Subnautica lawsuits, some Ubisoft happenings, an unfortunate NetEase studio update (shades of what I reported in February) and more …
Sony scored a win last week in federal court, as a judge in Illinois’ Northern District ruled that operators of 35 online marketplaces that sell their wares through Amazon were liable for violating PlayStation copyrights and trademarks.
In April, Sony filed a lawsuit against dozens of these shops, alleging they were operated by “counterfeiters,” from China and other foreign countries and were coordinating to sell fake PlayStation-related goods.”
Sony had also accused the shops of tricking people searching for legit PlayStation products to instead land on their listings.
From the suit:
“Many Defendants also deceive unknowing consumers by using the PlayStation Trademarks without authorization within the content, text, and/or meta tags of their e-commerce stores to attract various search engines crawling the Internet looking for websites relevant to consumer searches for Genuine PlayStation Products. Other e-commerce stores operating under the Seller Aliases omit using the PlayStation Trademarks in the item title to evade enforcement efforts while using strategic item titles and descriptions that will trigger their listings when consumers are searching for Genuine PlayStation Products.
In its lawsuit, Sony avoided mentioning just what the retailers were selling, but a check of some of the Amazon URLs listed in filings for the case show items such as gaming-themed posters and party favors.
After none of the accused retailers defended themselves against the suit, the court last week awarded Sony a default judgment. Nearly three dozen of the online storefronts were found liable for $500,000 in damages for trademark infringement.
Reading through the filings, two things stood out to me:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Game File to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.