Big Brother Comes to your PS3
Other than Little Big Planet has been delayed, you should be concerned about another anouncement that Sony made. They sent out a email that states “If you do not agree with the revised Terms of Service and User Agreement, please contact Customer Service to terminate your account(s). Otherwise, your or your Sub Account’s continued use of your PLAYSTATION(R)Network accounts means you agree to the changes,”, Now you might say, thats not too bad, but you should be worried.
This is exactly why you should be worried, because Sony also has the right to keep records of anything you say or do online, or to simply listen in.
“SCEA reserves the right to monitor and record any online activity and communication throughout PSN and you give SCEA your express consent to monitor and record your activities, Any data collected in this way, including the content of your communications, the time and location of your activities, your Online ID and IP address and other related information may be used by us to enforce this Agreement or protect the interests of SCEA, its users, or licensors.” So basically, don’t talk about how you are going pirate a game, or what custom firmware you are running on your PSP (which I do).
This new and “improved” Terms of Service for Playstation 3 comes with this little gem in regards to the restrictive DRM in their video store:
You bear all risk of loss for completing the download of any content and for any loss of content you have downloaded, including any loss due to a file corruption or hard drive crash.You are solely responsible for the storage and safekeeping of your content,” the agreement warns. “SCEA is not responsible for providing you with replacement copies for any reason.”
To begin with, I am pretty anti DRM and would never purchase a video that had it (or i didn’t have the abillity to remove it myself), but this is beyond stupid. Not only can you NOT re-download your movies, it is all up to you to have a backup as well because you have agreed that Sony doesn’t have to help you get your stuff back. I love you to Sony!
So the other Big Brother change in the Playstation 3 terms of service is about user created content. Again here is the exact spot from the Playstation terms of service:
“To the extent permitted by law, You authorize and license SCEA a royalty free and perpetual right to use, distribute, copy, modify, display, and publish your User Material for any reason without any restrictions or payments to you or any third parties. You further agree that SCEA may sublicense its rights to any third party, including its affiliates and subsidiaries. You hereby waive all claims, including any moral rights, against SCEA, its affiliates and subsidiaries for SCEA or any other third party’s use of User Material to the extent permitted by applicable law.”
So say you make any custom content in Little Big Planet or the new Guitar Hero: World Tour, it no longer is yours; Sony can distribute it and use it for whatever they want without contacting you.
Now the interesting part will bee seen if any of this gets used against a gamer, and mostly these terms of service are just there to cover the companie’s butt in case of emergency.
For more info on the restrictive Digital Rights Management on the PS3 video store, you can goto Ars here
