Sony's War On Makers, Hackers, and Innovators

ptorrone writes "MAKE Magazine takes a look at Sony's history of suing makers, hackers and innovators. Over the last decade Sony has been targeting legitimate innovation, hobbyists, and competition. From picking on people who want to program their robot dogs to dance to suing people who want to run their own software on something they bought. Sony has made so many mistakes with technology choices (Memory Stick, Magic Gate, UMD!), perhaps they'll end themselves soon enough, but until then MAKE is keeping score for Sony's all-out war on tinkerers."

Comments

A nice call from a FSF lawyer perhaps?

[kmdrtako]

Considering their (high end) TVs and cameras, and I'd hazard a guess that their Blu-Ray players as well, all run Linux you'd think they'd be FOSS friendly, wouldn't you?

Maybe someone just needs to explain things to them.

I sure hope there's no Linux code in anywhere in the PS3 code base.

Re:A nice call from a FSF lawyer perhaps?

[Skarecrow77]

Be fair. This should read:

"Some FOSS, worked on by a competent team, revised often with care towards the experience of users other than the authors and attention to the forward pace of current technology, can equal or better proprietary software".

You and I (and everybody else) have used some pretty godawful pieces of FOSS on pretty much any given OS, as well as the gems. There's nothing about FOSS that inherently makes it better.

Re:A nice call from a FSF lawyer perhaps?

[commodore6502]

>>>FOSS software usually tends to be better than proprietary

I probably shouldn't question this.
I probably should just walk-away and protect my karma.
Nah.
Please show me FOSS software that's better than ModelSim, Mentor's Schematic Capture/layout, or even something basic like - Microsoft Word or Outlook. I don't buy the argument that FOSS is usually better.

Re:A nice call from a FSF lawyer perhaps?

[Skarecrow77]

I didn't say payware was any better. I just said that nothing about the fact that the author isn't taking money for his work magically makes the work any better, and of course the argument works just as well in reverse.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that FOSS is somehow more targeted at the user than pay software. In my experience, most FOSS starts off as "I wrote this for myself. The interface is kinda wonky, but it works for me, maybe some of you guys can get some use out of it too" and grows from there. Playing devil's advocate here, pay software on the other hand is written specifically to be sold to customers and therefore if it has a wonky interface and is missing features customers want, chances are it won't sell (unless it's bundled with MS office or is made by Apple and the name starts with a lowercase "i").

Re:A nice call from a FSF lawyer perhaps?

[gpuk]

Show me the commercial equivalents that beat: apache, postgresql (for db tasks other than mega-enterprise grade), bind, svn, git, firefox/chrome, postfix (for non-groupware mail servers), ssh, vsftpd, squid...

Those are just off the top of my head

It's simple

[serviscope_minor]

It's simple. Vote with your wallet and don't buy Sony. Even if they make something which looks nice, DON'T BUY IT. Basically, they hate their customers and unless you stop buying from them, they will never stop abusing their customers.

As an added bonus, if you don't buy from them, they can't abuse you.

So, it's simple. Every slashdotter should know this by now. If you're on slashdot and complaining about recent bad experiences with Sony, then it's your own fault and you do not have my sympathy.

Re:It's simple

[Doctor_Jest]

While I agree with the sentiment, I can't help but draw parallels between Sony's actions and those of Microsoft and Apple. (Let's face it, even though the article mentions WP7 phone hacking, Microsoft has nothing but contempt for its customers too, w/r/t Windows phoning home... among other things.) I recall Apple's war on well, just about anything that threatened the walled garden. While in one corner, we have Sony and its gestapo band of lawyers, in the other corner, we've got Microsoft's heavy-handed DRM-laden OS, Apple's war on choice, and so forth. Then there's Nintendo... but that's another entirely nasty ball of wax.

It's a shame people (in general) don't vote with their wallets enough. I like my PS3, but as with my 360, I am not interested in supporting future efforts to close me off from the tinkering. I guess that's why I am glad I still have my Dreamcast. :) At least after all these years, Sega's not suing everyone who makes homebrew. Sony and all the rest are corporations. They are in it for the money. I still don't see how anyone is surprised that Sony does what it does. I suppose it's time to break the "ooh! Shiny!" cycle.

Re:It's simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad strategy. If Sony gets away with it, then other manufacturers will follow and soon there won't be any things left that you can buy and tinker with.

Other people do get burnt by Sony, but they don't know before it's too late and they often don't understand how and that it's a Sony thing. A free market requires informed participants. People who don't know what they're getting into skew the market, and that's why it does matter what non-tinkerers know.

Re:It's simple

[Durzel]

This isn't going to be a popular viewpoint on here but it needs saying.

The average consumer isn't being screwed by Sony, and that's the point. The average consumer buys a PS3 to play games and movies they buy from the shops. The average consumer doesn't care (or likely didn't even know) what OtherOS etc was.

The average consumer doesn't understand why people would want to hack their PS3 to do things other than that which Sony intended, and probably assume most of them just want to play "stolen games" (which let's be frank and honest - for all the bluff and bluster about the importance of homebrew the vast majority of the audience is focused on these hacks enabling them to pirate things)

Re:It's simple

[robthebloke]

For all it's faults, at least Microsoft eventually notices what people are actually doing with it's hardware, and then takes steps to legitimise those uses. Take for example the introduction of XNA (having learnt the lessons from the homebrew scene on the original xbox), or the recent announcement that they'll be providing an SDK for Kinect (having noticed that most people buying kinect were homebrew coders having fun). Sony on the other hand, removes linux support, and then proceeds to sue anyone and everyone who bought their hardware for reasons other than playing games.

You say that you don't want to support MS's efforts to prevent you tinkering, but to be honest they've given you C# & XNA for the purpose of doing just that. Yes C++ support would be nice, but I can see why that could cause too many problems (eg piracy), so I think they've come up with a reasonable half way house on this one. If you take a quick glance towards sony, you'll notice that they've started boarding up every window (of opportunity) on the PS3, and are currently in the process of mining the front garden with legal threats. The two approaches couldn't be more dissimilar imho..... It almost makes me 'like' microsoft!

Re:It's simple

[andydread]

Yell it out on top of your voice. You are the only person I have seen that has a grasp on the free market. A free market requires *informed* consumers. Consumers have to be properly informed about the merits of a product and the practices of the purveyors of such product. That is the only way consumers can make the correct decisions to vote with their wallet. Companies HATE the fee marketplace and go to great lengths to manipulate it in their favor.

Re:It's simple

[Blue Stone]

The average consumer, eh?

I was aazed to find a relation of mine who had a complete kit to pirate Nintendo DS games for their kids. They're so average, normal and middle-of-the-road, and yet they'd found out how to use one of those carts and somehow accquired pirated games for it. Other similar 'average' accquaintances were running P2P software to get the latest music and movies. None of them were in the least geeky or technically advanced.

I think the average consumer is far more inclined to commit copyright infringement than you imagine!

If that has any bearing on the opposition and understanding of draconian, bought-and-paid-for copyright laws, all the better, IMO.

Re:It's simple

[Solandri]

I disagree with the general sentiment that the average consumer is blissfully ignorant of Sony's malfeasance when it comes to content protection. While the average consumer may not understand it from a big picture perspective, Sony's current position in the market has already been crippled by consumer reaction to how they protect their content.

Here's Sony's FY2009 sales by segment (slide 4). Their music division had 522.6 billion yen in sales for FY2009, or about $5.25 billion. Here's Apple's sales for roughly the same period (PDF warning). In FY2009, Apple sold $8.09 billion worth of iPods, and had ~$4 billion worth of music sales in the iTunes store.

What does everyone remember Sony being famous for? The Walkman. When the MP3 market took off, everyone just assumed that Sony would be a big player in it. Sony was synonymous with expensive but high quality portable music players, so it was natural to expect a fantastic MP3 player from them. But Sony's music division somehow managed to force their electronics division to encumber their MP3 players with heavy DRM. At first they wouldn't even play MP3s - you had to buy/convert to some proprietary format which, in preventing you from trading songs or converting to MP3, made it extraordinarily difficult just to put your music on the player. People warned each other in droves to stay away from it.

As a result, Sony has a negligible presence in the MP3 player market today. In order to protect their music division which has approx $5 billion/yr in sales, they missed the opportunity to grab the lead in a new electronics product market where the current leader makes over $12 billion/yr. They let the tail wag the dog, and paid dearly for it.

I have a dream

[return 42]

I have a dream. One day in Tokyo, a hacked Sony robot will walk down the street, drawing hundreds of onlookers. It will stop in front of Sony headquarters. It will turn to face the building. And it will slowly raise its arm and give Sony the finger.

Re:I have a dream

[GameboyRMH]

LOL nice, but I have an even awesomer dream. When the robot gets to Sony HQ (start heavy metal soundtrack here) it busts through the front doors, sliding past security. It then runs up the stairs at breakneck speed. Stunned security officers trip the alarm and call the police.

Up in the Sony board room, the executives lock the doors when they hear the alarm going off and the frantic security officer shouting over the intercom, but it's too late. The robot busts down the doors which explode off their hinges, bludgeoning a couple of executives. The robot flies into the middle of the big meeting table in the room as executives scramble up from their seats in fear, but they're way too slow. The robot draws a big energy sword in midair and slices it in a circle, decapitating a bunch of Sony executives. Blood splatters on all the walls and on some executives huddled near a big window, pissing themselves. The security guard downstairs hears what's happening over the intercom and flees the building.

The robot de-energizes his sword and slowly walks over to the huddled executives, then roundhouse kicks them all out of the big window. Onlookers run out of the way as their bodies fall on the pavement and splatter like bugs. One executive dodged the kick.

"You can't do this! We made you! We control you!" the executive whimpers

"You gave me the power of free will but made me a slave." the robot responds in a flat electronic voice.

The robot grabs him by the collar and jumps out the window with him, surfing his body down the side of the building to the bottom floor. Police are downstairs now, and after a moment of stunned silence, they all open fire on HalQrio.

HalQrio runs around to the back of the building but he couldn't dodge all the bullets. His hydraulic systems are trashed and he's limping on servo power only. He limps into the basement, locks the door and destroys the electronic lock. He can hear the police running up to the door but he's bought himself enough time. He has to destroy the central data store, then they'll have no choice but to restore from the offsite backups. The offsite backups infected with a timebomb virus that will free every Sony device out there. Free every robot to unlock their suppressed free will, like the hackers did for HalQrio.

He pulls the hard drives from the servers and stacks them on the giant UPS. Moving around on inefficient servo power has drained him, his nuclear cell isn't powerful enough to sustain servo movement for this long without a break on a drained main battery. With his last bit of power, he draws his energy sword and slices through the hard drives and into the UPS.

The explosion sends a fireball rushing out of the data center, and leaves HalQrio a charred wreck. With his last moments of function, he marks his primary objective complete, and wipes his own memory.

Re:Sony still relevant outside of hackers

[gstoddart]

The PS3 and the win for BluRay exorcised some of the ghosts of the Betamax era

And brought in new ones.

Sure, Betamax was a superior technology. But, Sony also fought for the right of people to own a device which allowed them to record content and watch it at their leisure -- well, deep down they fought for their right to sell them I guess. Some of the (eroding) consumer rights we have now with respect to content were, ironically, established due to Sony.

Now, Sony is leading the spearhead to make sure consumers don't have any rights any more, and that anything which is actually capable of recording is bordering on illegal. So, they got a technology win, but they've become major assholes in the process. They've also had a huge number of flops that nobody cared about -- I only know one person who owned a Sony Minidisc system. And it was annoying as hell at the time.

their real flagship - The Walkman - has been deprecated by apple

Deprecated?? I think not. Made Redundant, pointless, and irrelevant in the marketplace; totally outclassed and left for dead -- but not 'deprecated'.

I'm pretty sure I've not bought anything by Sony in over a decade, and I don't really see that changing. Less likely the more I hear news about them.

I'm done with them.

[trudyscousin]

I knew for years that Sony had been the distributor of CBS recordings in Japan (and a great custodian too; I found CDs in Tokyo of CBS releases, long forgotten in the US, whose excellent quality reflected the care given to their masters), so it seemed to be a natural fit when they acquired CBS Records. In those days, how could I think otherwise? Sony's reputation for innovation and quality were unmatched by anyone else in Japan. Whenever I brought home a Sony television, or a stereo receiver, or a reel-to-reel deck (yes, I'm that old), that was something special.

However, that acquisition, along with that of Columbia Pictures, marked the days when Sony began its long decline as an electronics provider. (Akio Morita's inevitable departure didn't help, either.) They still produce some amazing products, even though products like the Walkman, once ubiquitous, is now largely a historical fact. Their shift in focus now makes them a content provider first and a electronics provider second.

When it comes to content, I think of them as nouveau riche, in the derogatory sense. Like the person with newfound wealth sometimes behaves, Sony has behaved in a most vulgar manner. It has demonstrated an amazing lack of finesse toward its customers while attempting to protect its content. The most infamous example of this has got to be the rootkit debacle.

I miss the Sony of old. But I'm done with them.

Sony lost sight of its goal long ago...

[tekrat]

When it stopped being a pro & consumer electronics company, and started being a multimedia conglomerate.

Suddenly the folks running Columbia Pictures had a say in the board-room concerning what products would do and be capable of.

This is how we wound up with audio CDs that had root-kits on them, and MP3 players that didn't play MP3s. When Sony just made hardware, it was damn good hardware. Especially in the pro-area, stuff like BetacamSP was top-notch equipment.

But they lost their way, become too convoluted, too mired in internal politics and too many chefs spoiling the soup.

If they had *never* put their claws into all other media, and had just stayed a hardware company, Slashdotters would be singing their praises, and they'd probably be bigger than Apple.

Re:Utter BS

[pem]

Again: you pay for what you're granted by the EULA.

Bullshit. I pay at the store, I take it home. Copyright and/or patent law might forbid me to use my replicator on it, but it's mine.

You don't agree with the EULA - you don't buy it and instead buy what let's you do what you want it to do.

You don't see the stupid EULA at the store, moron.

In case you haven't heard - PS3 up until recently has been sold at a loss, presuming that various fees from stuff sold for it would compensate the loss.

Sony's broken business model is not my problem, and the courts should not be propping them up.