New Sony Patent Blocks Used Games

January 5, 2013 - 12:21am

Sony has filed a patent application for a method to allow consoles to identify secondhand games and block them without requiring internet access.

The patent application claims that second hand games hurt game creators by preventing them from receiving their rightful “compensations.” This rings a bell to last year’s rumors that PlayStation 4 will block used games.

The patented system works by having an RFID tag in each game copy and an RFID reader/writer in each console. When a new game copy is played, the console ties the game copy to itself by writing its ID on the disc’s RFID tag. When that game disc is inserted into another console, the console’s RFID reader will read that info and refuse to run it.

"As a result, the dealing of electronic content in the second-hand markets is suppressed," reads the patent application. "which in turn supports the redistribution of part of proceeds from sales of the electronic content to the developers. Though in the following description a game application is exemplified as the electronic content, the present embodiment is similarly applicable to various kinds of electronic content such as an office suite, images, and music content."

Comments

How do you rent games?

I think this is a poor decision on their choice due to the following: What about renting games, or taking your game from the bedroom to the bigscreen TV in the livingroom, what about people who have a bunch of systems throughout the house. What about college dorm setups too with roommates, where you might have one system in the dorm and everyone has their own system at home. No more taking a game over to a friend's house? That is one feature I would NOT put in a console. Just put a magnet to the RFID tag and your done.

In hackers we trust

wont it suck when my daughter wants to play a game and because she first installed it on my 60 gig playstation it wont work on the new 500 gig for example. If the use only on the one machine and the "newer one that the allways release a few months l8rz sonys ceo can then suck my lillie white Cock-a-dodol-do. Like come on you put a baby in a microwave What on earth do you think will happen! “As a result,” the hacking has commenced! _________ In hackers we trust;==========

Would not buy

If this is the case i'm so not buying a ps4 chose me and my bro buy games and we both have our own ps3 so now we need to buy 2 copy's so we can enjoy them on our own consoles thats rip off and think sony is gone kill the business with it

Buy more chairs!

The patent application claims that second hand furniture hurt carpenters by preventing them from receiving their rightful “compensations.” Essentially, you can't take your chair to your mates place or use it in another room with another table. If your table breaks your chair will be useless as it won't work with other tables. The solution is simple, buy more of the same chair, one for your living room, one for your bedroom and one for your mates place. When a table breaks simply buy another. It doesn't matter that there will be waste as the carpenter will be satisfied with his extra compensation. It is highly unlikely that a black market for chairs will form as people are gullible and will be as many chairs as we tell them

This will never get through in Europe

The facts are, you are allowed to make one backup of any media as long as you own the original. The ability to do this is obviously knowing how to circumvent the copy protection and this is why all the console makers, and digital distributors for PC, make it clear that you forfeit your rights completely by circumventing such protection. ------------------------- The thing that gets me about this story is what of people like me that have three PS3's in the home? ---- I personally own two and the other is my sons. Does Sony honestly expect me to pay for 3 copies of one game just so i have the ability play whatever game on whichever console is convenient for me? ------------------- This is the worst bit of bullshit i've heard to date and if this feature built into the PS4 then i will be leaving that console well alone. ------ This move isn't about redistributing proceeds to developers. It's about maximising their own profits. Everyone knows developers get screwed by the publishers and the console market is a very, very closed system, monopolised by the manufacturer. ------------- Sony will be committing suicide to follow this through. Denying people the ability to use a legitimately purchased disc on more than one console, or to resell what they have purchased would be breaking consumer rights laws here in the UK and Europe. They would be taken to court in every country it sells its consoles in over this move if they did that. ------ The only move Sony would have left to them would be to make their next console one where the software was only available through its own digital service. But even then the European court has already ruled that even with digital versions of music and software, consumers still have the right to resell them if they wish. ------------------- It's going to be interesting to see where Sony takes this and how far they are willing to go.

out of their minds

Super aggressive company. I loved the ps1, ps2, ps3.. I got basically to play ps2 games and play movies. I wish they would focus on making the games and not owning OUR property. They believe they own the consoles in your house. All three of them. At this point I basically hate sony.

Patent?

Sony is patenting a way to screw their customers & piss them off so they can be the only one. Yeah nice one Sony, wouldn't want your competitors to fail worse than you right?

You think?

I think it'll be hacked like always. Consoles are dying regardless, but as long as they're around, they're gonna get hacked. No worries bloke.

Remember Vice City

The "how to know if your kid is RED" they(american republicans) clearly state: If you think your child might be a Red, here are some warning signs. They read complicated literature and have concern for their fellow man. They even like to share. Tell your kids that if someone approaches them with pamphlets about recycling, an invitation to a labor rally or show any doubts about the fairness of our system, then they should find a teacher or a policeman immediately. -What a big BULLSHIT! Sharing with your friends is a special thing, and Sony wants to destroy friendship replacing it with... NOTHING! and make more money in the process. Well, I'm happy with my PSP and my backups(games), certainly I won't buy the vita crap and for sure I won't buy a PS4 if this shit is real!

hahaha

so when your console brokes after rma you should buy all your games again looooool. sony is not in good condition and still they are trying to loose customers ... strange logic.

I'm pretty sure no one is

I'm pretty sure no one is dumb enough to let that happen. My guess they will do something that will require the console to connect to a psn account first before playing or a trial if you don't have one like in ps vita

Renting Games

Is this going to effect renting games as well? I can't see them spending more money and time on rentable only disks. All in all, it's a terrible direction to see gaming go.

download?

just another reason to steal the game i guess. bc im not paying full price for a game i might not even like and then have no way of getting any of that money back on a trade-in

Great thinking there, it's

Great thinking there, it's not like sony makes hudreds of thousands of dollars off the devs who pay to make a single game for their console right? Retard, if you don't like it don't buy the console, end of story.

Sony's Attack On It's Own Customers

Theres an old saying, you dont bite the hand that feeds you.which apparently Sony does not realize! Also this sounds like a good lawsuit for companies such as Gamestop and others that make money trading and selling used material which is basically again an attack on Gamestop and Sony's own customers. Sony must accept that when I buy a game for $60 that I own that game and I can do with it what I choose. If i dont like it and decide to trade it to my friend it should work properly! If im paying that much it better work in any Playstation I put it into! Also it just shows the greed and the bad business model that they are now working under. You cant have your cake and eat it to SONY! It's like taxing the the people twice and that will not sit well with customers!

"ony must accept that when I

"ony must accept that when I buy a game for $60 that I own that game and I can do with it what I choose" - That's where you're wrong. You don't buy games in stores, you buy a license to play them (the EULA) which is included in console games as well even though you don't have to click "I agree". As such, you can't do as you please with the game. What you do own is the physical disk, that's why used game sales are legal, but owning a disk and owning a game are completely different things.

FUCK GAMESTOP

They are the biggest part of the problem. When the bought out ALL of the competition, it was the beginning of the end of the game industry. They created a gaming "culture" (mostly of douchebags with FPS and sports games). Through this culture, games have been dumbed down. As the graphical quality goes up, the difficulty and consequently satisfaction of beating a game goes down with it. But that's not all. With the current generation of consoles, you don't even really own your software, hell you don't even own your hardware. You have to "agree to terms and conditions" and "log in" to play a one player console game. Pretty soon everyone is going to need to be a paralegal to play super mario to make sure you aren't breaking any copyright laws! But techincally SONY can do whatever they want, its how the free market system works. They can do this and the response by the public is going to be to stop buying their products if they don't like it. If enough don't like it SONY will either not do it, or will do it and lose a lot of money. Gamestop however is nothing more than a hack game pawnshop where "NEW" means its out of the case, the employees have already taken it home and played it, and the case is on the wall for any disgusting individual to touch, damage, or soil with disease. Go in Gamestop and ask for an UNOPENED product and they will look at you crosseyed.

just stop making disk games

if they implement this why even put out disk games any more and go to all download, simple way to fix this mess and link the id to your account that way you can go any where and play as long as you have you account id this is the best way to do it no like you can have 2 of the same id on at the same time, so this would make this more painless cause if your console goes caca you can still use it cause its account linked

So If I bought the game and

So If I bought the game and your PS piece of shit breaks that means I cant play the game I payed for? You are just asking to get hacked and make hackers out of people. How many jobs are you eliminating. In 50 years there might be 15 billion people on this planet and that's for the ones that are counted. Don't even bother with PS4, if you do you wont be making any money from games because you are going to get cracked.

POLICIES LIKE THIS WILL........

these policies will push many gamers away from SONY and its' new PS4 (Orbis). only the most hardcore SONY fans will put up with this bullshit. and even the hardcore SONY fan-boys will hate SONY for this. i can see MicroSoft doing the same thing. this is pretty grim news for console gaming. it's only going to piss gamers off. not to mention the hackers. hackers will make every-day-life at SONY a living hell. i hope and pray that hackers bring SONY to its' knees for bullshit like this. i understand why they don't sell PC games. they are to simple to pirate. but not allowing used games on consoles? are we supposed to throw them away or just let them sit there? so, you can't trade em in and you're not allowed to play your game in your friends console? and all because developers are SUPPOSEDLY getting stiffed if your buddy borrows your copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (probably will happen). whatever. i still have my ps3, but it's losing it's appeal. think i'll switch over to PC and the STEAM Network. where did developers go so wrong and totally forget that gamers sign the devs paychecks?

Its not the devs

its the publishers. The devs try to make the game the best they can with the time and money the pubisher gives them. The publisher says 'release it by next week' while the devs say 'no...its not done yet'. The publisher responds with ' You can patch it the next week, and we'll sell it as DLC '. Remember when a game was finished when it was shipped off to stores? Now you pay for the game, and then you pay for it again when they release all the shit that was supposed to be on it originally for another 9.99. To quote Videogame Dunkey, "This is Bugatti bitches, I'm outta here."

Both you and OP are wrong.

Both you and OP are wrong. What do hackers care about this shit? They're not bratty 15 years old who get worked up over silly console matters. They steal accounts, credit card numbers and other things that are supposed to be challenging, security wise. That's what hackers do, not play superhero for a bunch of kids who are too boneheaded to drop consoles and buy pcs.

You would've been right if

You would've been right if you had said DRM instead of steam. But you didn't, and steam isn't DRM, you can play purchased games in offline mode which doesnt even require you to login. Ahh kiddies, so much to learn...

steam does nothing like this.

when I buy a game on steam I can always sell my steam account and open a new account for free. I bought fallout 3 and when I was done with it I sole the steam account with the game Also sony is not selling new copies of its games for 5 dollars like steam does during its frequent sales.

Consoles meh.

I realize the fact that everyone has different tastes but this article shows just how much consoles aren't worth it and how much people shouldn't buy them, I've had my share of ps1 and ps2 consoles back when I was 14 (but hey I was a kid back then). Nowadays I only use my pc which costs almost 300euros more than a ps3 but then again, I get games for cheaper, with less hassle and less trouble than a console and also since it's a pc by nature it does more than just play games. Consoles are a thing of the past imo, too many restrictions with current (and possible future) gen ones. Open your eyes people, if you want a gamepad the pc has that, if you want to hook your game with the tv pc it has that too, if you want to pay less for your games, pc has that over every console. Have a nice day.

Hmmm

I have to assume going by your avatar you are a truther? I will agree though, the more restrictions and rights that are taken away from us the more everyone will start realizing just how badly butt-fucked we are getting.

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