Sony fights Memory Stick fakes
By
Mike Tomkins
(Tuesday, July 18, 2006 - 10:36 EDT)
A news article published in Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper yesterday reports that Sony Corp. is to take legal action to halt sales of unauthorized equivalents of its Memory Stick flash media cards.
According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun item and a related item in the Wall Street Journal (both available only to paying subscribers), the company is currently focusing its attentions on companies selling the unauthorized Memory Stick cards in Asia through online auction sites. Similar action is expected to follow in the US and Europe.
Sony believes that in the Japanese market alone, the third-party fakes are costing the company in the tens of millions of yen (¥10m = US$85k) each year. The cards sell for around half the retail price of properly licensed sticks, and are mostly manufactured in China and Taiwan.
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