Sony and write protection

This is one of the hotter topics currently filtering about the internet. Sony is apparantly accused of write protecting their disks to ensure that no game of theirs can be sold or loaned after already having been placed onto one specific individual console. Im no Sony fanboy by any stretch, and no matter how much I hate Sony as a corporation, I see no truth whatsoever to this rumour and I will explain why here.

Sony has made admittedly several mistakes already, but this would be a catastrophic blunder of a gargantuan proportion. Sony is already attempting to cover their hides with the cost of the playstation 3 console being at minimum $100 us above and beyond the Microsoft flagship xbox 360 console. However, despite the cost differential, Sony did throw in a blu-ray dvd player along with a hard drive that is at least equivilant to the premiere xbox 360 premiums hard drive. The Sony premium ps3 offers triple the current xbox 360 hard drive space. Cost in my opinion, for my budget is excessively steep, but there are others out there of better means or that like the system that are more than readily willing to pay the extra money for these features.

We now move on to the controller for the Playstation 3. This is another hot topic of debate especially concerning the release of the Nintendo Wii. Even though Sony has already produced licensed copyrights that predate the Nintendo Wiis controller, there are many out there that believe that Sony just literally found out that Nintendo went ahead and implemented the idea and Sony decided to jump on the bandwagon. Regardless of the hows and whys, I feel that there is enough of a difference between the two styles of controllers to ensure that there is more than enough room for both ideas to be successfully implemented. The Wiis controller setup is based off of motion. The Ps3s controller appears to be based off of certain gamestyles (driving/flying/motion based simulation type of games) while the Wiis motions are all inclusive to all gametypes.

Then if that werent enough of a hurdle, we still are faced with the aspect of Sonys online play which we still know little to nothing about other than it is free. We still know little to nothing about guaranteed launch titles for the Sony console. I think that Sony realistically has more than enough on its plate with
1)high console price
2)controller scandals
3)lack of knowledge of launch titles
4)lack of information with online play
to realistically concern itself with write protection of games.

Will Sony go ahead and write protect their software? Potentially yes it could happen and will more than likely happen sometime in the future, but I do not feel as though this would be the opportune time to do so. There are many out there that have already (due to the reasons listed above) jumped ship to either Microsoft or Nintendo. Sony already is around a year behind Microsoft, they cannot afford anymore major mistakes in the industry if they want to retain their #1 position in the console marketplace. If however this does happen, I fully anticipate that the ps3 will replace the gamecube in the #3 status of the business podium of console finishes.