[dfrage]

Here's a much better article: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/31/lto_patent_case_hit...

TL;DR, including knowledge prior to the latest wins by Sony: Fujifilm and Sony, the last two remaining manufacturers of high end LTO tapes have removed each other from the US market through legal actions. Sony as a result previously ended manufacturing of LTO-7 and never fielded LTO-8, more recently Fujifilm ended LTO-8 production. The theory a few months ago was that they'd get together and hammer out an agreement that would prevent a supply disruption, but that doesn't seem to have happened.

And for a bit of Original Research, maybe Sony wants people to switch to their and Panasonic's proprietary Archival Disc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc