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."

Sony still relevant outside of hackers

[fruey]

For non hacking, Sony do manage to be reasonably relevant. The PS3 and the win for BluRay exorcised some of the ghosts of the Betamax era (and Betamax was a superior technology from a quality point of view). Their midrange consumer equipment is reasonable, and their semi pro stuff still dominates [proav.co.uk] in AV markets and provides a big range of equipment [proav.co.uk].

That being said, they're no longer dominant in home audio (though they still have reasonable CD players and stuff) since their real flagship - The Walkman - has been deprecated by apple. Home HiFi is not selling as much, the PC is the new media center and there it's Apple all the way for most of my real music-mad friends. Sony have big corporate culture issues, but that's nothing new.

Re:Utter BS

[pem]

Again: you pay for what you're granted by the EULA.

Bullshit. I pay at the store, I take it home. Copyright and/or patent law might forbid me to use my replicator on it, but it's mine.

You don't agree with the EULA - you don't buy it and instead buy what let's you do what you want it to do.

You don't see the stupid EULA at the store, moron.

In case you haven't heard - PS3 up until recently has been sold at a loss, presuming that various fees from stuff sold for it would compensate the loss.

Sony's broken business model is not my problem, and the courts should not be propping them up.