Sony’s Playstation Network DRM of Doom
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
Been a while so its time for another fun rant from me. Back in June of this year I decided to bite the bullet and buy a PS3, 40GB model ofcourse, I ain’t paying an extra $100 for 40GBs more of space and at the time 40GB was $399, guess I should have waited a few months eh? Since getting the PS3 I haven’t had too many problems with the console, its done what its advertised and while I don’t own any blu-ray titles I’m set for the future when I finally do begin buying them. So why am I going to write a rant then? Well the title of this post should be a fairly good indication. I know Sony has a horrible track record with DRMs, there was the grand rootkit debacle with audio CDs, and the recent waves of complaints against SecuROM. I firmly believe that WE the consumers bought the CD/DVD, therefore we OWN the content on the discs, we are not just “buying the rights to use the content” as media companies love to claim.
Anyways, recently I decided to give PSN’s video store a try out and purchased two tv show downloads at $2 a piece. Should have read the fine print because as per usual I got to thinking “ok, how do I put this on my NAS so I can watch this stuff on my other PCs”. Well of course, I begin searching the web and find a variety of websites discussing the many problems with content downloaded over the PSN network, and one stuck out to me, claims that once you downloaded a video thats it, you only get one download, if the drive dies and you don’t have a backup then too bad. “There has to be some spin to this” I thought to myself and went to Sony’s only Playstation website to verify, and there it was in Section 9, Paragraph 5 of the PSN Terms of Use and User Agreement..
Downloading will be not permitted outside the Authorized Term. In addition, once the Video Content has been downloaded from PSN, you will not be able to download it again for any reason without purchase of another copy.
Wow…just one download? I paid money to get the file just once? I’m sorry Sony, but I’m going to have to use a Internet meme to sum this all up: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!!!!! Seriously, how do you screw something like this up? Valve seems to be the only content publishing company that can get DRM done the right way with Steam, at least with Steam once I purchase something I can download it as many times as I want as long as I’m logged into my Steam account. You can’t tell me its impossible to at least say “well this guys account is linked to this PS3 serial number, so as long as hes logged into his account and using THAT PS3 then he can download to his hearts content”, or, I don’t know, give me 50 downloads, I can’t see any reason for needing to download a TV episode that many times. “Well you can back your stuff up to a external storage drive”, yeah how many people are really smart enough to do that on a regular basis, Sony?
This DRM scheme is unacceptable and is a complete rip-off to the consumers, if this had been maybe a free download I could understand, limit 1 per customer, but for me to have to pay for the privilage of downloading my paid-for content just once….just..no, no thats not acceptable at all Sony, what were you guys thinking? No wait, don’t tell me, I already know, “$$$”. Well, this is one PS3 user that will be advising people NOT to download off of the PSN store, at least not until utilities become available to break the PS3 DRM system, you’d be better off going to the pirate bay or mininova to grab this stuff. Oh, and Sony, since I told you here, I won’t feel bad about using said utilities to break your DRM :3
