Earlier this year, reports and rumors were floating about Sony,s move to make PS3 games only playable on the primary game machine. In other words, games would be playable only on one machine and not playable on another PS3. The reasoning behind the supposed lock out was to restrict the activity of the used game market. If a lock could be put on video games to prevent replay on other machines, the games would be rendered useless for used game sales and rentals.
These rumors provoked enough interest to cause the UK to take a closer look at the legality of such a move by a game software publisher. According to Game Industry, prominent UK lawyer Brian Miller said that such a possibility was remote. Miller said, "Leaving aside the practicalities of creating such a form of license and the various difficulties that might arise, for example, where the purchaser owned two consoles, it is difficult to determine the legal basis upon which Sony would be able to prevent subsequent resale of the disk."
Sony has denied any plans to enact this lockout feature. However, Sony does have a track record of heavy copyright protection on their media. Sony has been recently embroiled in lawsuits over copyright protection schemes on music CDs which damaged and compromised computer security. Their decision to push their proprietary UMD disk in PSP machines was another attempt to prevent pirating. Sony,s selection of Blu-ray DVD technology is known for its hard-to-crack- encryption. This next gen DVD format has been popular with movie studios who are concerned about pirating.
With all of this considered, it wouldn,t be much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that this feature might have been considered for PS3 games. However, if this feature were activated, it would bring down a firestorm of trouble for the already battle weary game company – something that they definitely could do without.
