Sunday 18 September 2011

No angry mobs allowed at Sony and the Playstation Network.

In Sonys new PSN terms and conditions, there has been a little bit of controversy about law suits, the following bit in particular:

"Any Dispute Resolution Proceeding, whether in arbitration or court, will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class or representative or private attorney general action."

So yes you can indeed still sue Sony but you have to sue them individually. You will not (if you accept new terms) be allowed to get together with your local angry mob and go along for a group lawsuit. As of late I have started reading terms of service, and no doubt would of picked up on this. I probably would of agreed to it anyway. If I was to sue them I would rather sue them individually anyway, as if I won the case I wouldn't have to share whatever compensation received. If something does happen that requires a mass law suit, surely a hundred small cases would be more expensive for them than one case for a hundred people, so it would be their loss anyway.

I am only writing this due to the fact that the majority of people commenting on posts/articles about this are not even bothering to actually read what has been put in the ToS, and blinding bashing Sony, with comments such as:
'So sony's servers get hacked into and gamer's who's (unnecessary apostrophes, not important but it annoys me.) personal info get compromised and spread possibly all over the net can't sue them...That um...nice i guess. way to go in covering up and fixing mistakes, Sony!!!'

There are many more like that this is one I picked at random though. I'm just going to tear apart this comment to finish off this blog post. Aside from the grammar, which I'm not going to get into (I'm trying to keep my inner grammar nazi under control), let's start with the point about the Sony hack, while this is more than likely the primary reason behind this being added to the terms of service, if you were going to sue Sony about your details being taken due to the fore mentioned Sony network hack, you would of done something about it by now. Secondly you still can sue them as I mentioned earlier in this post. As for the covering up and fixing mistakes, I am not sure what he is on about here. The problem has been rectofied and they have updated their security system, ie fixing their mistake. Still not sure what they are meant to be covering up, unless he means covering their asses from angry mobs coming along to sue them in the future. Which while I'm not sure how legal that is, as it is essentially saying they are above that law, you can, and this is going to be the last time I say it, still sue Sony if you choose to, you just have to leave the pickforks, flaming sticks and angry mob at home.

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