Make magazine's Phil Torrone has had enough of Sony. Provoked by Sony's lawsuits and raids against makers who reverse engineered the Playstation 3, Phil has composed a top-seven list of Sony's most egregious and corrupt uses of the law to fight makers. Phil starts with Sony's legal threats against security researchers who discovered that Sony-BMG had deliberately (and illegally) infected millions of computers with a rootkit as part of a DRM scheme, and goes all the way through to the latest round of PS3 action. He finishes with the irony of ironies: Sony's eight-year fight for consumer rights when it introduced the Betamax VCR and was sued by the Hollywood studios — an era when the company's slogan was "experience the freedom of total control."
In this article, we'll explore Sony's long history of going after legitimate innovation, hobbyists, and competition. Sony, we've been keeping score. We're tired of you picking on people who want to program their robot dogs to dance. We're tired of you 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 we'd like to think there's at least someone there would wants to avoid Sony spending its last days sending DMCAs to anyone who tweets "46DCEAD317FE45D80923EB97E4956410D4CDB2C2″.
I couldn't find one location that documented Sony's all-out war on makers, hackers, and innovators, so I started my own (and it isn't pretty). The talented artists, designers, and engineers who work at Sony deserve better, and their customers deserve better. Don't worry, I'm not just going to spank Sony. I'm going to give Sony some ideas to right this ship and also let them know it's time to reconsider suing George "geohot" Hotz, the Playstation 3 hacker Sony is dragging to court for unlocking his PS3 to run his own software on it.
Sony's War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators
(Thanks, Gareth, via Submitterator!)
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- Embattled PS3 hacker raises big bank to fight Sony – Boing Boing
