State of Texas vs. Sony (cd trojan lawsuit)

#1 Sony shouldnt even bother.....maybe they should do something like Itunes,You can copy eatch song 7 times no more,no less, and the copies are to be kept to yourself(I think it goes something like that.

#2 Lesson learned:

Don't mess with Texas

#3 Charles: I believe the correct term is "Don't F**k with Texas" ;)

#4 Hundreds of billions? Does this sound like a bankruptcy to anyone? I donno how much money sony has, but . . . If texas wins, thats gonna be one rich state.

#5 Sony had less than 1/8th what MS had, the last time I looked. Must have been a couple of years ago now. And they havent been doing so well of late either.

#6 If Sony looses, could this be the end of the PS3?

#7 Texas doesnt need money, I live here and they just spent 43 million a new school that i go to, they dont need anymore money, but the spyware problem is bad, hopefully this doesnt affect the ps3

#8 This is what they get for the bad karma... fighting open CD, DVD and flash memory formats in favor of more costly proprietary
products. Sony wants to be in charge of you.. instead of being customer driven.

#9 If sony does go bankruppt, some other Japanese company will buy the PS3 off them for sure.

#10 Randy's got a good point there as I believe in karma, although I didn't see anything bad that has impacted Microsoft yet, but that's another story.

While I believe Sony should get what's coming to them, I hope it doesn't impact them to a point where they cannot continue with all the cool technology they bring us, eg. the PS3 and games, etc. even though I probably can't afford a PS3 anyways (the only reason I even have a PS2, is because it came standard with my gamer wife 1.0).

#11 I think Sony BMG and Sony Computer Entertainment are two different legal entities aren't they?

#12 These large lawsuits get rediculous after a while with outrageous penalties in the billions of dollars range - it's retarded.

We should have these matters be handled by the laws of the jungle and let the angry monkeys throw poo at the accused until they repent their wrongs and discover the miracles of their monkey god from space. And if they were innocent, then may the space monkey god bless their unfortunate souls.

#13 Jeff, shouldn't that last post be in the game ideas section? ;-)

#14 Yeah, I agree, that would be a great game. I'll keep an eye out for your .plan Jeff! :)

#15 @Jeffrey - Rule of law sir, and it's time to tame the beast. China is a good example of Jungle.

Good luck selling more than 2 copies of your game before the whole of Asia copies it a million times.

Court system is vital in this new Info Tech age. Todays gold is Intellectual Property. Black gold.. Texas Tea...

I don't think this particular lawsuit is out of line. They won't go far it's more to teach Sony a lesson
than to get actually millions. They will settle for like a million and a hand slap.

Cheers,

#16 Sony BMG and Sony Computer Entertainment all fall under the same corporation... a blow to one does have impact on all bodies. I personally feel Sony does need some legal reprehension for that crap they pulled... However, the executives shouldn't be being billed for it. What they did, essentially, was write a virus and distributed it millions of times over to an unknowing public. If your average Joe does that he ends up in prison, and that would be a much more fitting punishment.

#17 I very much doupt they will get fined to the full power of the law. But a good 10 - 40 million doesn't sound unreasonable to me. Allthough Sony did lose a TON over that dual shock force feedback case, so who knows.

#18 Randy, are you talking from experience here?... I've heard piracy is rife in Asia, but that's just what I've heard... don't know how bad it really is. I'm considering Korea as a possible market.. I have a few Korean friends so they could handle the translations but the piracy issue worries me a little.

Developers try to find new and innovative ways to secure their software, often hiding files somewhere on the end users's PC or burying keys in the registry.. but if the games developer went as far as Sony, what would happen?.. would a small developent company have to face the wrath of Texas, Beijing or Seoul?.. Or is it because it's a big company like Sony and people feel like they've abused their position and/or trust?

(I'm not defending Sony at all, in fact I think their actions are unacceptable.. but you can see their reasons)

#19 If you want to include spyware in your product, it is up to you. If you want to create potential vulnerabilities because of that spyware and not make the customer aware that it is on the machine, you're damaging your own reputation as a software developer.

Piracy is a huge issue, but crippling components of a customer's computer (as the initial uninstall did since it did not remove the device id, making the CD-RW not show up in Explorer even when the software was disabled) while potentially opening it up to malicious vulnerabilities is something that any software developer, regardless of size and stature, should be held legally laible for. Mainly for being an idiot and crippling their paying customers' machines while pirates can use hardware copiers, Linux, OSX, etc to rip the tracks and distribute them.

It is like the hardware dongle issue. Pirates crack hardware dongles usually within the first week of release. So, it ends up being the paying customers who suffer losing their dongles or switching USB ports (should their software recognize *which* port it was plugged into) to move between applications. I have a huge problem with companies that end up shafting their paying customers so that they can convince their board members that they are fighting piracy when their tactics are transparent to pirates at best and completely irrelevant at worst.

Sony attempted to subvert the process by installing malware are reprehensible. I hope they get slammed just like I hope that spam servers and spyware authors get slammed. They most likely won't, though. They will settle out of court for a huge chunk of change and corporate life will go on as usual.

Utilizing Asian markets requires more than security through obscurity. You need to have an effective plan of action. Nintendo had it initially with the GameCube since it released it on its own media (PSP UMD discs are another example). Unfortunately, it only took a intermediary reader to scan the disc, decompress the data, and then reburn it to another media which could then be wired into a GameCube to play pirated games. How can you fight this? Hardcode your datastreams to specific compressed locations on the media. Then the pirates will have to go through and modify every instance of the location scans. Would it take them forever if your game were huge? Probably not. They would write a program to optimize the process (probably within the scanning process to stream the data for duplication). That way, when it is captured, the original location of the compressed data is captured as well and then modified for the output location on the new media. So your checks and balances seem complete.

I don't have any answers to the pircay issue, but security through obscurity hasn't worked yet and I doubt it will any time soon.

I just hope they get nailed hard to create a legal precedence. Unfortunately, if it is settled out of court, a precedence will still need to be made.

#20 Maybe the only games that are safe from piracy are the online MMORPGs which issue the binaries and content for free and charge a subscription each month to play like Eve-online..

But then Blizzard had a spyware issue recently with their anti-cheat software for WOW... from what I read, cheating spoilt Diablo2 multiplayer so they were determined to stamp it out for World Of Warcraft. I know it's not quite the same thing as the Sony case, but it's still a spy program, reporting back on the user.. something which could be misused by some malicious individual.

So if it's not the piracy issue, it's the cheating issue or the hacker issue.

Makes me wonder how the online games which use real money for currency deal with the problem.