| Re: Nikon / Sony connection?
Sony makes most of the image sensors for the digicam market, so selling chips for the DSLR market is not fundamentally that much different. This type of arrangement is not unusual in the high tech industry, and companies have plenty of experience in dealing with one another in this fashion.
When Nikon and Sony work together on a project, detailed agreements are drawn up before anything begins defining exactly what each company can do with the products of that project. Any sensitive Nikon technologies in play will either be patented, or covered by exclusivity agreements that legally prevent Sony from taking advantage of that. Both companies are large enough to have their own phalanx of lawyers, and neither one is likely to leave anything up to chance.
Further, large companies like Sony are generally not run as monolithic entities. Different divisions are generally run as if they were independent companies, with separate budgets and responsibilities from one another. There are likely significant firewalls built up between the imager and camera divisions of Sony so as to allow their industrial customers to be confident that they won't be taken advantage of.
This is in their own interest, as the economies of scale gained by centralized production of sensors keeps costs much lower than firms just making sensors for themselves. For their clients, it means reduced costs of production and saves them from having to invest a ton of money into their own fabs. For Sony, it means that they have both the flexibility of in-house production as well as the economies of scale granted by this arrangement.
If one or two vendors go out on their own then this isn't a huge thing for them, as their volumes mean they will have a significant cost advantage. If, however, they took unfair advantage of their position with any of their clients, it would likely scare off the majority of their other sensor clients. Remember that the DSLR market is a relatively small portion of the business that Sony does, so any move like this would likely cost them a lot more than it would gain them in the long run.
It's also important to note that Nikon is also a major supplier of semiconductor fabrication equipment (Nikon's primary business) to Sony. The equipment that Nikon provides to Sony is critical to their ability to make the sensors that we are talking about, so this is a two-way street that we are dealing with here. This is especially important going forward, as the fabrication of things like full-frame sensors may depend critically on this relationship. | 
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