Sony's PS3 Lawsuit Is About Control, Not Piracy

from the can't-let-go dept

As GeoHot/George Hotz continues to fight his legal battle against Sony for daring to restore functionality to Sony PS3s that Sony had deleted, he’s apparently been able to raise a bunch of money for his legal fund through donations. That’s nice to see. He’s also put up this amusing (and seriously NSFW) rap about the lawsuit:

Seems like he didn’t need copyright as an incentive to create that one, huh? Anyway, what struck me as the most prescient statement in the linked article above, however, was this line:

“Sony tried to sue a guy for getting his AIBO to do non-Sony approved tricks, making it apparent that they don?t really care about piracy, they care about control.”

We actually wrote about Sony’s response to AIBO hacks a decade ago, and it’s absolutely true. Copyright is supposed to be about incentives to create. But it’s generally been twisted into a tool for control against “stuff we don’t like.”

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Companies: sony

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Comments on “Sony's PS3 Lawsuit Is About Control, Not Piracy”

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22 Comments
Dave (profile) says:

And yet Sony is involved with AllVid

What I don’t get is how Sony can constantly pull stunts like this, from the rootkit fiasco on down, yet latch on to AllVid and demand that cable companies open up their services to 3rd-party boxes. Seems like Sony is just asking big cable to cede control over to them, rather than actually “be more open.” How can you trust a request to be more open from Sony?

TryLearnSomething says:

Sony own the software the consumers don’t.
The software license (EULU) states that Sony can remove the other os feature.
Too bad.
Don’t like it?
Guess what it’s stated on the back on the box when you buy it.
Don’t like it?
Too bad go buy a computer and quite whining over a OS,
and remember YOU DON’T OWN THE SOFTWARE yea yea you own the hardware but not the software.

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