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

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

[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

[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

[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: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

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.