As part of Sony and Microsoft's lawsuit over the Activision Blizzard deal, Microsoft filed a special motion in the presence of Sony to create the right for both parties to defend themselves, but Sony asked that the subpoena be quashed for inconvenience caused by the company or failure to disclose confidential documents.
The subpoena has 45 separate requests for documents from Sony, one of those requests is a copy of every licensing agreement or exclusive agreement with Sony and “all documents and communications.”
In fact, Sony tried to dismiss the subpoena in one form or another, arguing that there were a number of requests that had nothing to do with the case, or that they were too time-consuming and expensive. However, according to a source among the FOMC's senior legal experts, all of Sony's arguments were rejected.
Sony argued that the information had no apparent value in the acquisition case and that compiling the documents would mean an “extremely complicated” manual review of more than 150,000 records. That would require effort or a lot of time.
The Federal Commission responded to these allegations, noting that the company has the ability to set a certain deadline and will draw up documents and agreements with third-party game development companies dated January 1, 2019 to the present date. At the same time, the Federal Commission did not understand what the burden was related to the collection of documents, as these were “unnecessary” justifications.
It seems that Sony is still afraid of not being able to compete after this deal, but we are waiting for further developments.
