Laxman9292 said:
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I have to say something for your lighter analogy. I don't think it really translates, arson is a very high profile crime and hard to get away with, also the amount of users using lighters legitimately far outweighs the arsonists, so they feel safe selling them. Conversely, piracy happens everyday all the time and is much harder to track and punish.
Therefore if Sony lose out on conservatively 5-10% of the profit from their game division (which brought in 15.6 billion dollars in 2008, most recent official proof I could find http://bit.ly/fLBNEi ) you would lose anywhere from $78,336,200 to $1,566,724,000. And that was 5-10% and I'm sure the percentages are a little bigger than that. So really it just makes sense, you can't blame Sony for taking out a function few even legitimately used (HONESTLY, how many of you guys had homebrew on your PS3) when it could cost them up to around 1.6 billion dollars.
I'm all for individuals property rights, but at the same time true justice needs to watch out for Sony's intellectual property rights as well. Just because they are a rich company doesn't mean they can't have shit stolen from them and be the victim. Nor does it mean we should let it slide because "they're Sony, they're rich, they can afford it". That is NOT justice. Besides, it's Sony's prerogative to decide what they want to equip their product with. If you don't like it, return it or don't buy it.
Well, there is an issue of consumer rights here as well. The problem with this specific issue is that Sony promised a specific feature to people and then removed it. The alternate OS option was a big feature to some people, like those nuts who worship Linux like some kind of developing virtual god. Sony wasn't so much equipping their system with a protective feature, as they were removing a feature from a product.
Now, some people will go on about EULAs and what people agree to within the software loaded on the PS-3, but one has to understand that those agreements are effectively meaningless. They have just never been challenged correctly. Money was accepted for these products without any such agreement being made. For a EULA to be binding on something like a PS-3, someone would have to sign off on it at the store as part of the purchusing price, or the entire thing would have to be printed on the box. There are also various laws governing "fine print" and deceptive contract practices. Simply put contracts have to be concise and easily understood by the parties involved, you can't hide text, or make referances to documents that aren't availible right then and there. There are exceptions to this of course, but one of the reasons why notaries come into play for most major contracts are to act as witnesses that all parties understood the agreement, and also to provide expert testimony if there is a disagreement later based on their understanding of what was agreed to. Contract law is a huge mess of a field, and simply put most people who have gone up against EULAs in the past have never approached their challenges from the right direction. Truthfully I think that if challenged under the right grounds, many EULAs which go on and on and on would be shot down for that reason alone if someone who knew what they were doing actually challenged them. The basic arguement being that there is no way an average person could really understand what a lot of these things were saying, especially when they make referances to state laws that aren't themselves entirely clear or presented as part of the document for referance.
Whether EULAs are binding is a whole differant arguement, and can lead to a huge debate in of itself. So far they haven't been slammed in court, but I think it's going to happen especially as more people get irritated, and along with the greater number of people comes a higher quality of people who better understand what angles to use.
Another point is that you mention being able to return the product, that's a big issue with software, and almost as big an issue with hardware. A lot of retailers won't take something like a game box back if it's opened. If your dealing with a multi-year old game machine that has features removed from the company, your not going to be able to hop on down to the local store where you bought and and get a full refund. Hardware rapidly depreciates in value.
As far as the issue of the money being made, I think you misunderstand where I am coming from. I'm not saying that because a company like Sony is rich they don't deserve legal protection. I'm far too much of a capitalist for that. What I'm saying is that consumers
ALSO deserve protection, and it's a balancing act. In a case like this, you have to weigh which is the lesser of two evils. What companies like Sony want to do, definatly impacts more people. Especially seeing as you can't consider piracy actual losses of sales, because there is no guarantee someone who pirated something would have purchused the product to begin with. The damage done by piracy is based entirely on the assumption of lost sales, and that's a false assumption. Piracy might be wrong, but it's also wrong to assume that someone who takes something for free would have paid for it if it wasn't free. The amount of money that *might* be being lost to pirates is outweighed by the legitimate consumers who ARE being made to suffer due to what the companies are doing.
On top of this, there is no real mechanism in place to police the "security" measures companies are using. All of this security to track users is also being used to gather data. This whole "metrics" thing, which "Extra Credit" did a run down on not too long ago. These guys aren't JUST securing their products, they are spying on people with the attempt to use gathered data to manipulate them through advertising and such. Truthfully I also think that's the tip of the iceberg as far as this is concerned, since the abillity to profile people with games, and the uses that can be put to from a psychological or sociological standpoint can have some frightening implications. As things are now, there is absolutly nobody protecting us from companies, and ensuring that they use their security systems ONLY for security and not for manipulation or various violations of privacy.
If companies like Sony were in danger of going out of business, I could agree radical action might be nessicary to protect this developing medium from being destroyed. That isn't the case though, games and gaming hardware are making a bundle. Their victimization isn't something that should be ignored because they are rich, but because protecting them leads to greater evils being inflicted than allowing it... at least at this time.
With time should a method arrive that allows companies to protect their IPs without affecting legitimate consumers, then by all means use it. Likewise as an emergency method if we're about to lose the gaming industry as a whole to piracy, I can see some extreme things done for purposes of preservation. Right now that's certainly not the case.
My arson example wasn't meant to be a perfect analogy. My point is that a lighter is put mostly to legitimate use, but a few people will use one to do maassive damage. In theory any person with a lighter could be that person doing the damage. It's an inherantly dangerous thing, and you need to basically put trust in humanity not to go absolutly crazy with the power of fire in their hands, and that means more or less having to take a lot of lumps from arsonists. It's the same thing with the gaming industry really, enough people are dealing with them legitimatly for them to be making billions of dollars. Just because there are some crooked jerks out there doesn't excuse trying to create a glorified police state. It's sort of like how if people were going around lighting everything on fire, then banning lighters would be appropriate, because obviously we couldn't have a society with major cities and things with that many jerks... but you know, that doesn't happen.
