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When the PS3 was first announced one thing Sony did was to promise it would be unlocked – hoping to wean the part of the market which has hitherto been Xbox-aligned away (mainly IT-savvy people who liked using the xbox as a cheap server).

Then they reverse that decision and piss off thousands of IT geeks and hackers who’d bought the PS3 exclusively in order to run it as an ultracheap mainframe server.

As a result, said IT crowd sat down and started hacking the PS3, eventually succeeding, and then published the key. You may recall how well that panned out for Sony when it turned out that hacking the master key to the PS3 also gave access to Sony’s developer network and some of their customer master data.

So Yes, Sony DID INDEED end up shit creek when they decided to remove the functionalities they’d promised their customers from the PS3.

“Conservative”, above, is one of thousands of people, including me, who now view Sony as a horde of scumbag scam artists hell-bent on screwing their customers over for shitz and giggles.

Added to their previous launch of the “Sony Rootkit” it’s not far-fetched to say that today any person going to a techie of their aquaintance in order to obtain purchasing advice will get “Just don’t buy Sony”.

It’s the advice I give.

Although to be fair that will only provide a good guesstimate, it’ll certainly be enough to tell him that a file with a seed/leech count of 100/10000 appears to be quite popular compared to one which has 2/200.

And in the end all Fairfax really needs to know is “Which releases are the current top ten in popularity?”.

My point is that if they still have a hold of your eyeballs, they still make money even if it’s not coming directly from you. This is either a downside or an upside depending on how one wants to view it. I see it as both and probably necessary in order for shows to keep being made. I could be wrong, but I think the BSG: Blood and Chrome wasn’t picked up specifically because it’s too expensive to make. Hopefully this kind of thing won’t be seen as a problem down the road once it’s realized advertising dollars are still worth something even when shows are pirated.

In short, you might need a hundred man-hours worth of expensive lawyer time for every stakeholder just to free up one production for release in another format without serious legal risk.

Which just goes to show how very unwise betting on the ip-horse really is.