By Nelson Schneider - 09/13/26 at 03:27 PM CT
The recent backlash and attempted boycott of Sony’s digital PlayStation features wasn’t the only thing customers have done in an attempt to fight back against Sony’s latest hubristic moves toward totalitarian control of everything PlayStation. There was also a class-action lawsuit, arguing that Sony’s terminology on their digital stores was misleading.
Sony brought their best crack-team of lawyers to fight back against the class-action suit... and it would seem that the crack-team might just flat-out be smoking crack, since their arguments as to why PlayStation customers have no legal rights to the products they buy digitally are so incredibly stupid they go beyond the mere “bad faith” that we have come to expect of our corrupt lawyers in the 20th and 21st Centuries, all the way to what the classic (?) comedy, “Tropic Thunder,” dubbed “full retard.”
First, Sony attempted to argue that no reasonable customer would click on the word “buy” or “purchase” in an online store that sells licenses digital products and expect to fully own the product they were paying for. That’s pretty stupid on the face of it, since digital products and physical products use the same terminology, and customers do, in fact, believe they own the physical things they buy from stores like Amazon or eBay.
But it gets worse. Sony’s lawyers then proceeded to argue that it is impossible to sell multiple copies of a digital product, as there is only ever one digital copy of a game, movie, or song, and that if Sony actually sold it and transferred ownership, only the first customer to click “buy” on the PlayStation Store would be able to own that game, and everyone else would just have to lump it. How is this an argument that came out of a multi-million dollar law firm kept on retainer by a multi-billion dollar company?
No only is Sony’s legal argument against even the possibility of selling ownership of digital products fundamentally idiotic on its face, it runs completely counter to everything Sony – and many other purveyors of digital goods – have been telling us since they first started trying to phase out physical media. There’s even a user-researched page on the Consumer Rights Wiki with a non-exhaustive list of the times Sony used language that made it unambiguously clear that they did believe it was possible to sell copies of digital games without fully transferring ownership of the “original” (whatever that means in a digital context where every transfer is a copy combined with a deletion). At the time of writing, there are 34 times where Sony used this kind of language. Is it any surprise that customers who might (foolishly) trust Sony and their corporate reputation would believe they actually own digital products instead of temporary – and revokable – licenses?
Sony’s retarded lawfare in this case might actually be worse than when Nintendo tried to patent “summoning” as a unique gameplay mechanic that can only be legally used in ‘Pokemon’ games. These corporations don’t seem to realize the danger they’re in. When the only thing keeping the populace placated is ready access to cheap food and entertainment – the fabled “bread and circuses” that allowed Rome to soldier on longer than it reasonably should have – charging $20 for fast food and taking away the ability to pay once to own entertainment products is removing the last two stumbling blocks against open revolt.
