Sony & Gawker Partner to Produce Lifehacker.com

Once Sony sponsors a site how can you trust any review on the site to be impartial?

...dont make a lot of software, but in terms of Gizmodo that's an interesting point - i presume this has been thought about and factored in somewhere though..

but has it been factored in publically? It'll want to be, to reassure the fickle techie nurd audience :o)

As they are incorporating the sony logo into the lifehacker masthead it could be seen as pretty much sony site...

A few more details just published at mediapost

I've had some personal experience with Sony. It wasn't good. And I'm not talking about their products. Their products are good.

I used to be the Intellectual Property Manager of a company that held a lot of patents worldwide with more on the way. The patents were able to address all sorts of issues, and could be applied to many different products.

I helped negotiate deals with Porshe, Agfa, Bosche, GE, and a bunch of others, and the only 2 companies that we had serious issues with were Philips and Sony, both of which are notorious Intellectual Property bad guys.

Feel free to check this out on the web - it's quite interesting to see who has been suing them recently and why. Both are very aggressive regarding patents.

Philips is known to shop around for the one country that you didn't manage to patent your idea in, build a factory, and start making rip-offs. Of course, that's legal since there is no patent there, but you can see the attitude behind it. That's how they became such huge lightbulb manufacturers - Thomas Edison (now General Electric) didn't patent the lightbulb in Belgium - guess who built a lightbulb plant in Belgium? Nice. Try negotiating with them personally one day - they had an unbelievably arrogant attitute. There was a lot of "Well, we are Philips and huge, so you have to do everything our way and we don't want to sign anything, just give us all the stuff we want and trust us because we are Philips..." By that time, our attitude was "No, we are not going to trust you with so much as a post-it note *because* you are Philips..."

Ironically, Philips is extremely aggressive in filing patent infringment claims regarding their own stuff, of course...

Anyway, back to Sony. While we were in negotiations with them, they asked to see our patents (fine - patents are public) and began to ask detailed questions about how the process worked, all the while under the guise of contract negotiations, and due diligence. We later found they were busily patenting variations of our stuff while we were sitting in the boardroom in good faith during licensing talks! Aftward, they decided they didn't want to license our patents because they "found" something else all by themselves...

Not nice. But that's apparently what they do, routinely. It IS legal, technically. BTW, the reason I mention Philips is because they later tried to do something similar, as well, except by that time we had learned from our Sony mistake.

I would personally not let either company anywhere near the operations, patents, copyrights, ideas or any other intellectual property that you have in any way, shape or form. I wouldn't trust them if they were blindfolded, gagged and earplugged.

But they would probably act legally. Not morally or ethically, but within the specific boundries of the law. If you are used to dealing with people like this, fine, go for it.

But I wouldn't let them anywhere near MY site...

Good luck.

Ian

"Well, we are Philips and huge, so you have to do everything our way and we don't want to sign anything, just give us all the stuff we want and trust us"

I knew there was a reason I liked that company.

Sony are paying $25,000 a month according to adage - free reg req'd on the link...

and we now know the price of Gizmodo's soul ;)

Truth be told, I'm rather surprised its that much. I'm not "hip" on the whole gizmodo and engadget thing, but even for such top-of-the-line blogs that seems kind of exorbitant -- does anyone know what they routinely pull in, in terms of ad sales per month? Are they used to this range, or was the new range a part of the decision to run with it?

wanted to give TW $25,000 a month i'd have a very hard job saying no heh...

good luck to him i say!

I checked out the site and it looks pretty interesting. It's not like they have patents, so hopefully things will go well for them - all the best, for sure.

Ian