This Is So Off Topic But My Blood Boils Just Thinking About It - More Sony DRM

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27568">http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27568</a><br /><br />Sorry. This is my last DRM/Sony post for the week, but what in the world are these loons thinking? <i>(Please read the rest of this post with the understanding I am banging with considerable pressure on my keyboard and there may even be some spittle flying here and there.)</i> Sony has applied for a patent that would put render Playstation 3 games unplayable on any console but the one it was <b><i>first</i></b> played on. No selling it, no taking it to a friends house and forget your entire collection if you get a newer playstation a year or so later or get a second playstation for the minivan for those long road trips.<br /><br /><i>"A PATENT may allow Sony to ensure that no game would be playable from any console other than the one in which it was first read. Joystiq is reporting that this patent is the source of the many rumours that will mean as much to gamers as DRM is for music fans. The technology would allow an authentication code to be read and then rendered unreadable, making the software unplayable on any machine but the one which first read it."</i><br /><br />The insanity of it all. :evil: This is enough to make me stop buying anything Sony makes. Oh, wait. I started doing that in the late 90's.

[JonnoB]

If this were to come to be, say good-bye to lan parties and game rentals at blockbuster and gamefly.

[Clinton Fitch]

Congratulations Sony! :beer:

You have offically still-borned the PS3!

It is one thing to attempt to protect your intellectual property from piracy but holy smokes this is taking it to the highest degree.

Now we all know if Microsoft tried to pull this off they would be back in front of the DOJ and the courts before they could say "unfair competitive advantage". :robot:

[duncanhbrown]

I used to think, "It's a Sony."

Now I think, "Oh No, it's a Sony."

Perhaps they're doing this so that people will buy the CDs and memory and devices from all the other manufacturers, because they look so much better by comparison. Kind of a loss-leader strategy.

Or, to quote one of my favorite bosses,

"What were they thinking?!"

Duncan H. Brown
Smartphone &amp; Pocket PC magazine
www.pocketpcmag.com

[jerboa]

As much as I drool over the PS3, the proprietary Memory Sticks and now this will make it much easier for me not to part with my money!

Enough is enough, Sony!!!

I might even have to look at an XBox 360 instead! 8O

[rmasinag]

I really doubt this will be employed becuse as soon as the first person posts that this in fact exists on the PS3, goodbye sales!

Thank goodness for the internet and forums! It pulls back the balls of companies who try stupid sh@$@ like this

that NVIDIA 7800GT SLI is starting to look attractive!

now if we can only prosecute EA for Battlefield 2 ...... :evil:

[Dr. Grabow]

Have faith in the power of the market. If this is true, goodbye PS3.

[applejosh]

I don't see how this could be true. The rental business, not to mention just borrowing games fom friends and such, is what drives the business. "Hey Fred, can I borrow your &lt;whatever> game?" "Sure" "That was a great game. I'm going to go get it."

While I'm sure people have found a way to copy those things, I know of no one who has copied a game console disc. So I doubt it's as much of a problem as they are alluding to. But who knows. Glad I got an Xbox.

[Jerry Raia]

This kind of thing makes me regret my last Sony purchase which was a laptop. I am through with them.

[MG]

I think Bill Gates himself may have given Sony the idea... right before the launch of the Xbox 360. Can anybody say "PS3 DOA"?

Mark

[JonnoB]

I think the patent is a neat idea. Maybe this is not how regular games will be sold, but how less expensive games licensed games will be? Maybe this is a way to distribute pre-released games for use in kiosks and prevents theft?

While I hope that Sony will use the technology for benevolent means, I have a suspicion they will shoot themselves in the foot over its implementation.

[ricksfiona]

There are a few games ONLY available to PS that I really like. But I CAN live without them. The PS3 would have to be a geometric level better than XBOX for me to still purchase the PS3 with this 'feature'. I doubt it will be that much better though.

Whatever the case, I'm sure someone at Sony is checking posts like these and reporting back to HQ. Hopefully they will listen.

[Jason Dunn]

Sony is on a roll here. It takes special leadership to inspire so much anger in such a small amount of time. Well done Sony!

[Jerry Raia]

Sony is on a roll here. It takes special leadership to inspire so much anger in such a small amount of time. Well done Sony!

Motorola seems to have the same gift in the Smartphone world :lol:

[johnm]

I'm guessing that this is a hoax of some sort. I find it hard to believe they could be that stupid. - Not impossible to believe, just hard. Personally I hope it IS true since I'm a big Xbox fan. This kind of restrictive technology would kill the PS3 before it even left the gate.

[KTamas]

Mmm, yet another reason for me not to buy anything sony :P
The last yony thing i had was a CD-reader i think, don't remember the name exactly (8421 or something), but it serously sucked...

[MitchellO]

If this is true, mod chips would become so incredibly popular they'll come in cerial boxes. this would be Sony's biggest mistake, as it will absolutely kill the PS3.

[surur]

Devil's advocate, but how is this different from MS Product Activation?

Surur

[alabij]

Product Activation doesn't prevent you from transfering the program to another PC. It however restricts how many active copies there are.

Sony is beginning to suck. Not that I care; I don't buy Sony products. Microsoft may be a big bully but there are certain lines they don't cross.

I too am a fan of the XBOX/360. Anything to kill the PS3 is fine by me.

If this takes foot, it may revolutionize the gamming industry. No more preowned games, no more rentals. Man DVD might even incorporate this technology if Sony is able to pull it off. WOW 8O It's going to be a scary future

[jmulder]

Devil's advocate, but how is this different from MS Product Activation?

Surur

First of all, most MS products requiring activation come with a 'grace period' (50 starts, 30 days, whatever).

Secondly, not many people lend MS software. When was that last time you heard someone say, "Hey, can I borrow your OS?".

The requirement for a physical disc already makes sure that more people aren't playing a PS game than have paid for it. Think of it like a concurrent use license, if 10 people buy it, then up to 10 people can use it a a given time, because that's how many discs were bought. If they go with this new method, siblings each with their own PS3's couldn't play each others' games.

It's just messed up.

[Ed Hansberry]

Sony is on a roll here. It takes special leadership to inspire so much anger in such a small amount of time. Well done Sony!
:rotfl:

[Ed Hansberry]

Devil's advocate, but how is this different from MS Product Activation?

Surur
You don't take your Office CD to your friends house to play with Excel.

[Damion Chaplin]

Sony's been doing this sort of thing for a while now...

This year, I sold some Sony backup and recovery CDs for a 7-year-old laptop (that my friend killed) for $250.

$250!!!! For recovery CDs for a 266mhz laptop!!!

Why? Because without those CDs, that hardware is so much garbage. Sure you can install your own OS on the hardware, but you will never get all those bells and whistles working without the recovery discs. The laptop this guy bought it for couldn't possibly have been worth $250 anymore...

And I guess that's what Sony's counting on: people who are willing to pay anything for the Sony name. Sony has some serious loyalists out there...

[jickbahtech]

Devil's advocate, but how is this different from MS Product Activation?

Surur
You don't take your Office CD to your friends house to play with Excel.

Well maybe YOU dont...

[Duncan]

I'm not sure there isn't an over-reaction here. Yes - Sony have made some unfortunate decisions. Yes - they like to patent stuff they shouldn't. Yes - they want to control what people can and can't do too much. Yes - -they are too fond of proprietary standards.

However - as has been pointed out above - 1) it is easy to think of non-evil things this lockdown can be used for and 2) there is no evidence that Sony are intending to make this a universal feature. Indeed - it is highy unlikely they would do so - are they really going to cut off income from rental? Risk no sales because people can't swap games or use games on more than one console? Hand victory to MS?

I'm sorry - but Sony has a habit of doing bad stuff because they know they can get away with it and still make sales. They are cynical - not stupid - and I just don't believe they intend to do a general lockdown.

[Paragon]

Question- Where on God's little green earth is it written that Sony is going to implement this on PS3? So far I see a whole lot of speculation and no evidence.

[cmlpreston]

You could put an alternative spin on this.

A Patent doesn't give you a right to do something, but rather prevents others from doing it (with some caveats).

Therefore, one could say that Sony is in fact preventing such a mechanism being deployed by all other companies. This is bad, how?

cmlp

[PPCRules]

Not that I thought XBox needed any help on the way to domination, but this will/would make it a lot easier to get there.

But once that happens, this issue (Sony's swift move) will be forgotten when people complain about the unfair business practices that Microsoft uses to steal the market from another company that should rightly be able to maintain it without regard to their intelligence or competence (or lack thereof).

[Ed Hansberry]

Therefore, one could say that Sony is in fact preventing such a mechanism being deployed by all other companies.
:rotfl: good one cmlpreston. Of course, that's it! Sony is looking out for our interests and preventing some unscrupulous game console maker from restricting content in this nefarious manner. Kudos to Sony, THE Fair Use consumer advocate. :D

[cmlpreston]

:rotfl: good one cmlpreston. Of course, that's it! Sony is looking out for our interests and preventing some unscrupulous game console maker from restricting content in this nefarious manner. Kudos to Sony, THE Fair Use consumer advocate. :D

Well, I didn't say it was likely! However, people do get a bit carried away when new patents appear.

cmlp

[stevehiner]

Anything Sony can do to kill the PS3 is OK with me. I probably won't own a 360 until they come down in price a bit but I will own one eventually. On the other hand there's almost no way I'll ever own a PS3.

[Jonathon Watkins]

I used to think, "It's a Sony."

Now I think, "Oh No, it's a Sony."

:way to go: Spot on.

I hope this rumour is true. It really would kill the PS3 and hopefully teach Sony a lesson. People have got to wake up at some point....

[Jonathon Watkins]

Sony is on a roll here. It takes special leadership to inspire so much anger in such a small amount of time. Well done Sony!

So true. Just about every Sony announcement in the past year has made me more annoyed with them.

Forget the king of proprietary. If they keep on going, they are going to be the pauper of proprietary because people will simply stop buying their stuff.

[TzviYosef]

A big problem here is with broken PS3s. Let say I have a PS3, and somehow it accidentally breaks. Well, I have several games and I want to continue to play them. So, I go to the store and I buy a new PS3. I get home and I discover that none of my games work. Then I am up the creek without a paddle.

--Tzvi

[Felix Torres]

Question- Where on God's little green earth is it written that Sony is going to implement this on PS3? So far I see a whole lot of speculation and no evidence.

Nowhere.
And they would have to be galactically stupid to implement it on *anything*.
But...

The fact they spent money developing this tells you they are thinking about ways to restrict users' ability to run games.

The fact they spent time and money preparing a patent application tells you they can envision a situation where *they* would *want* to do such a thing.

The fact that they actually submitted it and we found out about it tells you they are so disconnected from their users that they didn't consider that the mere *suggestion* they wanted to do such a thing would reflect on the PS3 because the timing says they were doing all the above at the same time they were developing the PS3.

In a world that can't tell the difference between correlation and causality, mere coincidence easily becomes rumor and rumor becomes urban legend and products can be tainted forever. And products that rely on network effects to succeed cannot afford even the faintest taint.
Once folks realized Sony was thinking of building consoles that lock gameplay at the same time they were designing the PS3, that simple linkage *had* to set alarms off all over.

Yet the Sony folks are either cluelessly unaware of the damage they were doing to the unreleased product's reputation or, maybe, they think that their fanboys would buy anything with the Playstation name on it, regardless of quality or restrictions.

What were they thinking?
I dunno.

Lately, I haven't seen much evidence anybody at Sony actually *thinks*.

[szamot]

Putting it bluntly, Sony has not developed anything decent since the Walkman days, that was their last good invention. So in my world it goes like this. Oh it's Sony - who cares!?
Don't buy it, don't use it, could not care less if they burned down to the ground, I actually don't need them to be happy/amused/entertained. NEXT!

[Darius Wey]

There's gotta be a mad party over at Microsoft and Nintendo. Every employee must be off their faces on Dom Perignon.

:beer:

[Craig Horlacher]

Sony, are you on crack? If your goal is to kill yourself off in less than 36 months you're right on doing a good job. You may as well promote the nutbucket who came up with this idea because that should help make the whole process go much faster.

I love my psp. I can't believe it was made by a company as blatantly stupid as sony.

I'd go on to explain just a few of the reasons this is a bad idea but I'm sure many other people who are posting have done a good job of that and this is one of those cases where if you're as screwed up as you clearly are it's far too late to help you.

My only prayer is that Google would buy you...then there may be hope.

[fierywater]

I'm just going to close my eyes and pray that Sony isn't stupid enough to implement this.

[Phillip Dyson]

I think Bill Gates himself may have given Sony the idea... right before the launch of the Xbox 360. Can anybody say "PS3 DOA"?

Mark

You mean like Bush giving Saddam the okay to move into Kuwait? :devilboy:

[MitchellO]

I love my psp. I can't believe it was made by a company as blatantly stupid as sony.

Yeah, I love my PSP too. Awesome device.

Must made by the same compnay that makes many of the best recent PDAs: HTC! :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

[jlp]

Putting it bluntly, Sony has not developed anything decent since the Walkman days, that was their last good invention. ...

The Walkman was NOT even an invention per se. Just like the invention of the Light bulb was attributed to Thomas Edison, he didn't invent it. He did however make it of a practical use in daily life. Others had worked on this invention some decades before him. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#History_of_the_light_bulb) But an invention that only works for a few seconds, minutes or hours is impractical. He made it longlasting and usable on a daily basis without needing to worry about replacing it only every few months.

Likewise the Walkman was not an invention, merely logical miniaturization of something that already existed and made it practical for people to bring it with them everywhere.

They associated a trademark with it, which became a household name just like Frigidaire, Jeep, Delco, etc.

[jlp]

...
I'm sorry - but Sony has a habit of doing bad stuff because they know they can get away with it and still make sales. They are cynical - not stupid - and I just don't believe they intend to do a general lockdown.

Cynical but not stupid? They recently gave proof enough they can be more then stupid: even dangerous!!

This rootkit-DRM affair is not only stupid, this is a terrible blunder that's getting them sued over.

[jlp]

...WOW 8O It's going to be a scary future

It would only be scary IF we support these things...

OTOH if we BOYCOTT all those unacceptable schemes on a LARGE SCALE, they will BE FORCED to change their ways!!

Visit my site boycott-it.info (http://boycott-it.info) (more particularly the DRM sub-domain) (http://drm.boycott-it.info) in a few days (probably ready by this weekend) to see what is possible to be done about this unacceptable threat...

[dorelse]

This stinks of Rumor. Think about it...how could they fix/repair/exchange a PS3 unit that fails under warranty?

If it is true, its still just a patent to protect their 'intellecutal property'. When I worked for IBM we did patent apps all the time for technologies that we didn't have an immediate market use for, but wanted to protect the investment in case the day came when the market changed and it became marketable. It was just a legal way to stamp your name on an invention and protect it.

Now...I'm an XBOX guy, and won't touch Sony products since they screwed me on my Clie T665 &amp; Memory Stick compatibility....but, they would have to be suicidal to try this one.

[milo]

Jeez. What a lot of fuss. Sony cannot use this on retail software because it contravends the already established legal concept of fair use.

However, it can be used for promotional purposes, trial versions, demo copies, one off freebies given to VPs, etc. (although not magazine disks because technically you have bought the software as well as the magazine)

However, it does remind me of the pre-installed versions of Windoze that you get with many new computers that does not come with the original disks. I am sure that one's also not entirely legal...

[Mark Johnson]

Since there have been ample "how stupid is that" posts, I can save the effort of bashing Sony too. (I think I may be over my quota for this month anyway.)

I am, however, kind of curious how this could be accomplished. It seems equivalent to shipping a product (say Halo 2 for Xbox) with every single DVD-ROM uniquely "burned" with a specific serial number. Am I missing something? I can't think of any example of CD-ROM or DVD-ROM (or DVD movies, etc.) where something like this has been tried because (obviously) the production cost for the discs would be insanely higher. You'd be bascially burning millions of "one-off" DVD-R copies of Halo 2 at a factory instead of millions of actual copies of one master.

I honestly don't get it. Am I misunderstanding Blue-Ray or something... Isn't it just a "big capacity" optical disc with the same fundamental workings of CD-ROM and DVD-ROM? How could this even be practical?

[Mark Johnson]

Jeez. What a lot of fuss. Sony cannot use this on retail software because it contravends the already established legal concept of fair use.


Actually, that's not quite true unfortunately. That's the real problem of the DMCA, and the fact that people believe their Fair Use rights are not at risk are overlooking the Orwellian nature of the DMCA:

YES, established law (in the US) gives you, the consumer, many reasonable Fair Use rights.

HOWEVER, the DMCA makes it "functionally illegal" for you to exercise those rights.

BECAUSE, the DMCA explicitly forbits people to have/make/distribute "circumvention tools" for ANY purpose, even Fair Use ones.

SO all Hollywood/Sony/Big Industry has to do is place any content you buy behind any kind of encryption/DRM method and you're (legally) completely out of luck.

DMCA = Catch22: You are no longer LEGALLY able to EXERCISE the rights you unquestionably LEGALLY have.

[UnLoGiC]

All the recent actions from sony has made me come to a conclusion, the people making these decisions must be VERY far from their average customer. And by far i mean on a diffrent planet or something like that. Cause normaly when you run a busniess you listen to the customer and try to make your products and services as appeling and user friendly as possible for your customers but Sony is really heading in the opposite direction :pukeface:

I mean if they asked one hundred PS/PS2 owners I bet that all hundred would say that this disc-bound-to-one-console crap is something they DON'T WANT!

...and who buys something they dont wan't?

[surur]

Mark, have a +1 informative point on me. DRM recently has been all about tying content to hardware e.g WPA, Itunes, Microsoft Reader etc. The best DRM I know of so far has been eReader's credit card encoding, but even this removes your resale ability. At least you are not tied to hardware however.

Surur

[jlp]

DMCA = Catch22: You are no longer LEGALLY able to EXERCISE the rights you unquestionably LEGALLY have.

So why nobody attacks it for being unconstitutional?

**enormous double-quote trimmed by moderator JD. Please don't quote entire messages.***

[Kevin Daly]

Sony are committing vandalism.
It's as simple as that.

Despite the fact that I really, really like their toys, I can't bring myself to have any further dealings with a company that arrogantly assumes the right to indulge in criminal activity with regard to people's PCs.

[Altaman]

I really don't understand what the fuss is about, consumer rights have been disappearing for some time now...you should be use to it.

We have DRM, HDCP, DMCA, Government sanctioned protectionism stopping you from buying outside the country you reside (as in Television), general copy protection and more if a person thought about it. We really do not live in free countries anymore, our rights are just words unless big business says we can have them.

All I can say is get use to it, the system is setup to force you to buy new hardware, software or whatever as the economic reality is business comes before the consumer in every instance. BTW if that expensive HDTV does not have DVI/HDMI (or only one port) forget about HD-DVD!

Alt

[Felix Torres]

I am, however, kind of curious how this could be accomplished. It seems equivalent to shipping a product (say Halo 2 for Xbox) with every single DVD-ROM uniquely "burned" with a specific serial number.

I haven't checked Sony's patent to see how its done but one way it can be done very cheaply is for the game disk, which doesn't have to conform to any spec (it isn't a true CD, DVD, or BD-ROM, after all) to come with a small write-once region.

Then, on the console side, each unit would have a unique serial number (in the CPU, chipset, or ROM or, since they all have ethernet built-in, they could use the tranceiver's MAC ID).

After that, the first time you play a game, the game (or the OS if you don't trust your licensees either) writes out the ID number on the disk. Afterwards, the game launch procedure would test for the burned-in number and match it to the console source.

Another way would be to stamp-out all disks with the exact same onboard game code but on the way out of the plant to burn a unique serial number on a separate assembly line. Then, at first play, the console "phones home" with its own id and the id of the disk and ties them together in a master database at Sony HQ. After that, every attempt to play the game checks the remote database and to see if playback is authorized. This approach would allow for console repairs since the Sony techs would be able to clear up the console authorization records once they took a damaged unit out of service. But it would require a communication link every time a game is played.

If you stop to think about it, there are dozens of ways this can be achieved.

And not a one of them preserves what current users consider to be fair-use of the game disk.

Caveat emptor!

[Felix Torres]

I really don't understand what the fuss is about, consumer rights have been disappearing for some time now...you should be use to it.



The fuss is that as you said, consumer rights *are* disappearing.
And it is up to all of us to let vendors know when they cross a line between the mildly annoying to inconvenience or, as in this case, unacceptable.

And this particular case is in a product area that is already one of the more restrictive ones anyway so it is easy to argue that it isn't needed at all.

Think about it, the game disks are *already* tied to a single vendor's architecture to start with. You can't play Playstation games on an XBOX, can you?
So the only way you can play such a game is by paying Sony for a console. As already pointed out above, the only people who can play a Playstation game are Sony playstation owners.

This isn't about piracy.
About stopping people from making game copies or even playing out-of-zone games.

It is strictly about used games and game rentals and game lending.
It is solely about squeezing the last bit of profit from their customers.

If Sony were to actually go ahead and implement this on a product, big if, mind you, any customer that submitted to this would not only be screwing themselves, but also everybody else. Because if other companies see Sony getting away with this, they figure they too can do it.

So I suggest to you that making a big fuss is not only appropriate, but required.

Or not.
It all depends on what kind of world you want to live in. 8)

[Altaman]

[quote=Altaman]
So I suggest to you that making a big fuss is not only appropriate, but required.

Or not.
It all depends on what kind of world you want to live in. 8)

Sorry I thouhgt by the way I wrote the msg that it would be understood that I am completely for consumer rights. The msg was meant to show how much of our rights have been taken away in our "Free Countries"! It is really pathetic how much we are allowing big business and government to take away from us.

As a prime example, in Canada if you subscribe to a U.S. TV provider (paying/gray market) you are classified as a criminal same as a person who steals/black market. Another example is the Sony PSP, they keep updating the firmware on it so that the product YOU OWN can not use what is called homebrew (running non-comerical/freeware/shareware applications).

I am a big video fanatic and as I said with the upcoming HD-DVD they will only be supporting DVI/HDMI/HDCP and component inputs will no be available or will be disabled to a point that only a lower resolution than what the HD-DVD is capable of will be displayed.

Things are not going to get better from what I can see as big business puts money into the political coffers and the groups/associations that support these industries have a war chest specifically to buy the government/party backing. I have and will continue to write government, my MP corporations or whoever I can, but the problem is that the average person will not realize what has been lost till it is too late.

Alt

[WialyDiody]

I really, really hope that this does come to pass. Hear me out. IMHO one of the major things that allows DRM schemes to continue taking over everything we know, is the lack of education of the public, these companies WANT (NEED) people to stay in the dark. Your average consumer buys a CD that says something about "This CD does not conform to CD standards" and they say, "who cares, it plays just fine in my car", and so they continue to buy more DRM'd CDs, the DRM doesn't effect them and their listening habits, and so that person goes on thinking that this 'DRM stuff' really is just something that effects people doing illegal things. This is how it goes for the vast majority of people. But all of us know that it really only burns those of us who try to use our legally owned material to it's full potential.
Now, enter an over the top scheme like this.
The PS3 will have a huge opening week, as expected, because sony has kept this 'feature' well disguised under some mis-leading labels. People will start finding out about it the hard way, the main-stream media couldn't resist a story like this, and suddenly, over night, millions are educated about just how far the evils of DRM can go. So now all those people who used to not know or care about the little DRM warning labels start to take notice for fear of what it might really mean when they go to buy their next CD or device. And as for Sony, after all the negative media, they are forced to either recall the 2 million PS3s out there and remove the lockdown, or face never selling another one again.
So in theory, something like this could serve as a wakeup call to both unaware consumers and to big businesses who are trying to pull this kind of garbage.
That's my prediction. :)

Matt

[Darren Behan]

Won't buy HP anymore for a variety of reasons mostly to do with their behavior toward PPCs. Now won't get anything from Sony due to too many reasons this week.

Pretty soon I'll be down to an Etch-a-Sketch as my only multi-media device. Though it does show videos (if twist the knobs really quickly), and play music (Salsa mainly if you shake it at the right tempo), play games (you can make a pretty mean tic-tac-toe board) and, of course, display pictures sadly it's still only available in a grayscale model...

db

[Ed Hansberry]

Wanted to make sure everyone following the Sony DRM issue saw this update (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/index.php?topic_id=44303).

[natecorbitt]

Keep in mind that Sony made changes through the life span of the PS2 that were KNOWN to cause a PS2 to show a wonderfull "Can't Read Disk" error unless you opened it up AND TIGHTENED A SCREW.

This is also the company that's getting in $#!&amp; for their Rootkits (what exactly is a rootkit? The most basic ones are designed to ensure that regular PC monitoring commands and tools cannot see whatever has been planted on the victim's machine) on their music CDs.

Oh...and it's also the company whose 3rd party developer tools are soooo poorly put together that most people expect it will take till well over a year after the initial release before the coding for games on the PS3 becomes good and can take advantage of the PS3 hardware (ie, most of the early games will be PS2 quality graphics or worse and be buggy as hell).

[davea0511]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27568
The insanity of it all. :evil: This is enough to make me stop buying anything Sony makes. Oh, wait. I started doing that in the late 90's.

Therein lies your problem. You keep forgetting BetaMax, Clie, MiniDisk, Memory Stick devices, etc... Sony is the king of suckers. They give you a superb technology and flood the market with thier incredibly huge marketing muscle so you think it will always be widely supported. Then they give you the shaft. Meanwhile, your friend who bought VHS, PocketPC, Rio, Compact Flash devices, etc is still using his equipment, and always at a lower cost than you ever did.

Frankly I can't figure out why people keep financially rewarding this company when they have the most consumer abusive history of any electronics company in the world. I don't care if they have the best technology. The last sony product I got was a BetaMax in the 80's, and Sony corporate greed taught me a lesson I've never forgotten.

You and I aren't much different. I just don't forget. Not all that glitters is gold, and that especially is true when it comes to Sony's glittery products.

[Ed Hansberry]

Therein lies your problem. You keep forgetting BetaMax, Clie, MiniDisk, Memory Stick devices, etc... You and I aren't much different. I just don't forget. Not all that glitters is gold, and that especially is true when it comes to Sony's glittery products.

Uhm... who said I forgot anything? :confused totally: I have never purchased anything from Sony with proprietary media, like the BetaMax, but I never had a problem with things like TVs or radios until they just kept up with the proprietary media every few years and built computers with non-standard components. I decided then I couldn't even trust them for basic things like a normal TV. Who knew what wierd thing was inside that would cost most people $40 to repair but $150 because it was unique to Sony?