ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 5 -- United States Patent no. 12,274,938, issued on April 15, was assigned to Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc. (Tokyo).

"Information processing apparatus and inputting apparatus for sharing image data" was invented by Tomoki Takaichi (Tokyo), Kiyobumi Matsunaga (Tokyo), Toshimasa Aoki (Kanagawa, Japan), Takeshi Matsuzawa (Tokyo) and Takahiro Fujii (Tokyo).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods and apparatus provide for: generating image data for an application to be displayed on an output device; recording the image data generated by the image generating unit; and receiving operation information from an input device, where the recording includes storing the image data ...