Sony's competitive position

[TadpoleJackson]

huiii said:

yes BDA owns the trademark to blu-ray but each company holds their own patents for their onw inventions (in blu-ray). BD4C Licnsing Group is just for the patents of these companys and not for all blu-ray patents and since sony was a founding member of BDA and basicly (as far as i know) pushed blu-ray the hardest, i'd figure that they've got some essential patents to blu-ray, wich means every blue-ray disc or player sold also gets sony money.

BD4C: "[...]The group was formed in an effort to offer licnsees an one-stop shopping for essential Blu-ray and DVD patents owned or controlled by the four companied.[...]"

http://www.cdrinfo.com/sections/news/Details.aspx?NewsId=27093

Yes, you are right. But Sony is far from owning bluray like the OP implies. By proffesional estimates Sony owns less than 30% of blu-ray IP, and they don't even own the most out of all the companies with Panasonic owning more than Sony does. I'm not sure how much it costs to license a blu-ray drive, but when DVD players became mainstream it only cost $4-$5 to license one. And ~$1 per console over ten years isn't really much to brag about. 

And from what I've heard they own more disc patents than anything. So Panasonic would probably be making more off of them. 

Persistantthug said:

Sony is the HEAD of the BluRay Disk Association.

Sony is on the board of directors with 18 other companies.