A U.S. court has told Sony to halt sales of its Playstation consoles and pay $90 million in damage to Immersion Corp, a California tech company. Obviously shares of the tech company have jumped since the news (5% at last count).

For the time being, Sony will keep selling PlayStations as the order — which covers the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, two game controllers and 47 software titles — will not go into effect before the appeal, an SCE spokeswoman said. Sony will be paying compulsory license fees to Immersion, she added.

Why all the commotion? Well immersion believes that Sony has infringed on their technology with the use of their shock controllers that vibrate in sync with the action of games.

The $90 million awarded by the court is more than triple Immersion’s total revenues of $23.8 million in 2004 and represents two-thirds of the company’s current market value of around $135 million.

Time to retire.