Sony Demands 150K Per Song From Customer.

[TedShatner10]

Dear God Sony, your outrageous decisions and retarded evilness has ceased to be surprising:

'No Justification' for Stocking the PSPgo
3:00 PM on 06.25.2009, Jim Sterling

Uh oh. Sony may think it can charge whatever it wants for hardware and the people will come flocking, but the high price of the PSPgo, not to mention its digital-only game library, has irked a number of independant retailers in the UK, who now see no valid reason for them to bother stocking Sony's latest portable.

"From my point of view I've got to think, 'Do I want to stock this?' Right now I can't see any justification for stocking it," Don McCabe, Joint MD of UK retailer Chips.

"Certainly I'm not getting the response from consumers," he continues. "Normally when a new piece of kit is launched or announced I'll get a multitude of people saying 'As soon as that comes out I want one of those.' First adopters are on the phone within seconds of it being announced and you've got your pre-orders. I don't have a single pre-order for PSPgo at the moment."

Fellow retailer Grainger Games says that it has "no pre-orders at all" for the system, although it will have to stock a few just for anybody planning to drop in an buy one. Either way, it would seem that despite Sony's arrogant claims that Europeans don't care about price, the company's hiking in PAL territories may just bite the publisher in its arse this time.
We'll have to see how it goes, but frankly, if you're going to try and price gouge in Europe as much as Sony is, you kind of deserve everything you get. Sony earned the lukewarm reaction to its hardware this time.

Link

Then you get this guy who is bang on the money about Sony painting itself into a corner by not making PS3 not that user friendly due to its excessive anti-piracy systems. You can't even play PS2 games on there! Piracy perversely helped to make the first Playstation such a smash hit in the first place.

Copyright as it is now is an aberration that will pass within ten to twenty years, and Sony will probably vanish with it if stays the course. No sympathy at all.

 

[Yoda]

Then you get this guy who is bang on the money about Sony painting itself into a corner by not making PS3 not that user friendly due to its excessive anti-piracy systems.

That guy's a moron. I gave up around the time he was hyping the robust linux and emulator 360 scene as reasons for Sony losing market share. Some of his broader points are reasonable enough, but he just doesn't know enough about what he's talking about to have any truly meaningful insight.

You don't have to expose the world to your ill-informed idiocy just because YouTube exists and you happen to have a webcam!

 

[ancient]

You know, I can go into most librarys and borrow a CD for free, which is essentially the exact same thing as file sharing. (They bought it, then let an unlimited number of random people to listen to it free) Most librarys also have DVDs, and obviously books/mags/papers. So this "entitlement" ranting isn't something that really takes into account that 'sharing' has been around forever. CDs and internet files may be a new medium, but they're working out the same way as older mediums. Perhaps Sony is acting this way because they were hoping their baby would allow them to gouge a lot more effectively and it didn't work out.

Sony's very own tape players have a record button for ease of making free duplicates. There is a certain leeway that has ALWAYS existed, until now anyway. It's always been in the best interest of copyright holders to protect their work up to a reasonable level, beyond which, while technically legal, it's completely pointless. It just takes a certain small amount of business savvy to know where to draw the line.

Where Sony got the idea that prosecuting some random person was a profitable venture that would somehow help them fight actual damaging bootlegging operations is a mystery. Somehow a lawyer has convinced them to pay him a huge sum of money to waste company time going after some poor slob whose assets probably don't add up to 150K while making the company look especially bad at the same time.

Good work. It's not going to affect anything though.