“This motion seeks to close the door for rampant piracy that Defendants have illegally pried open in violation of federal and California law”… So states Sony’s legal documents against hackers.
For anybody who hasn’t been following recent developments, George Hotz, the hacker famous for the iPhone jailbreak recently released Sony’s PS3/PSP master keys on to the internet following his successful attempts at hacking the PS3.
These keys allow PS3 users to run homebrew and other unofficial software on their PS3s… as a consequence it hasn’t taken long for other hackers to figure out how to get a few official games working using this new found information and it is highly likely a easy to use “Backup” loader will undoubtedly appear within the next few weeks.
Now this post is not to say whether I think Sony will or will not crush George and his hacking friends but to comment on the quote from the legal documents noted above.
Rampant piracy? Seriously Sony how likely is this?
I believe the PS3 has a user base of just over 40 million worldwide.
How many of those 40 million would have access to a blu-ray recorder? I certainly don’t and I would suspect I’m a lot more tech savy than most of the 40 million users.
Ok, so what if I don’t need a blu-ray player… what if I just download and install games to a hard drive instead? Ok, fair point… but, given the fact the PS3 games are on blu-ray that tends to mean a game could be on average 20GB+. Now I don’t know about you but I do have some download limits and I suspect quite a lot of the 40 million PS3 users probably do too.
So… you do the maths, how many of the 40 million users are going to be trading in pirated blu-ray discs or downloading 20GB a pop games onto their PS3? Yes, some will…. but would it be enough to be considered rampant? I doubt it.
Of course, in 5 years or so time I’m sure 20GB will seem like nothing and probably in 5 years time piracy on the PS3 may be rampant but, by that time, I’m sure most people will have moved on to the PS4 so doubt there would be 40 million users interested in pirating old PS3 games.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, or, as we are talking about rampant piracy maybe I should say just my pieces of eight.
