Standard Mischief

The latest trick from Sony seems to be a scheme to insert itself into some kind of counter-culture advertising. They seem to be paying graffiti people to post Sony-approved pictures of kids playing with the popular mobile gaming toy PSP (PlayStation Portable).

[fair use from http://www.secondaryscreening.net]

Besides the exact same images showing up in different cities at roughly the same time, there appears to be the wheatpasting of flyers going around and some stickers being stuck too. I wonder how Sony is going to explain this? Perhaps the old corporate-personhood-thingy standard mischief excuse of blaming the advertising agency/subcontracters? MobileMag reports Sony is denying everything at this point.

Gee, Mall-wart did it.

“It is our understanding that the individuals taken into custody at the Pottsville distribution center construction site were employees of subcontractors and not Wal-Mart associates,”

So did Nokia.

Reviewing Sony’s past standard operating procedure (”rootkit” DRM CDs, Sony minidisk format, the Betamax licensing issues…), it seems to me that Sony aspires to become an all encompassing entertainment media juggernaut, delivering movies, music, video games, and other types of entertainment via their own carefully designed hardware, using their own proprietary consumable media that lets them earn a royalty on every purchase. in other words, All your entertainment are belong to us.

In the Sony utopia, all this proprietary hardware won’t play nice with gear from other manufactures, the hardware’s firmware will be obfuscated to prevent “evil hackers” from repurposing the gear, and it will “phone home” to the manufacture, spying on you and what you watch. What, you didn’t read the shrink-wrap licenses? 57 pages of legalese that the all powerful corporation may revise at any time with no notice at all to you. Hey, it’s all right there in black and white, what’s your beef?

Now, my small “l”, libertarian leanings are speaking to me, telling me that if Sony-corp can legally pull all this off, more power to them, and yea that’s true. However corporate-personhood-thingys have all kinds of advantages, like being able to afford squads of lawyers to write licenses or getting “vanity legislation” passed by our congress-critters, such as DMCA, or the Broadcast Flag. There is also nothing against the grain in me choosing to use my rights enumerated in the First Amendment to convince Joe Sixpack and Jane Whine-box to spend their money elsewhere.

And that’s pretty much what this post is all about.

Update: The official munge, thanks to !Habit Forming, is “Fony PAYstation”

Update: I just wanted to mention the possibility that this is some kind of smart mob anti-Sony smear campaign. Clever if true.

Update: This looks like a ink stamp for a bar, showing you have already paid to be admitted.