Sony is patenting a technology that can detect and blacklist pirate apps on media players and smart TVs. Through the use of monitoring software, third-party applications sideloaded onto these and other devices can be blocked, effectively protecting rightsholders against online piracy.
Over the past several decades, Sony has established itself as a leading player in the technology, music, film, and gaming industries. The Japanese company hasn’t shied away from taking on the competition, but one adversary has proven particularly difficult to overcome; piracy. Sony recognized this threat early on. At the Americas Conference on Information Systems in 2000, Sony Pictures Entertainment’s U.S. senior vice president Steve Heckler declared an all-out attack on piracy. Responding to the Napster threat, which had just reached its peak, Heckler promised to take aggressive steps to tackle the online scourge. “We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC,” Heckler said.
This wasn’t an exaggeration. In the years that followed, Sony rolled out some rather aggressive technology, most notably the software exposed in the DRM rootkit scandal. After affecting millions of people, a mass recall of infected CDs and several class action lawsuits ensued. Fast forward more than two decades and Sony is still fighting online piracy. The company hopes that cloud technology will eventually defeat piracy in the gaming sector, but on the video entertainment side, blocking may still be required. As Heckler envisioned at the start of the century, Sony has since obtained various blocking orders around the world, requiring ISPs to block subscriber access to pirate sites. More recently, this effort was expanded to DNS resolvers with Sony’s lawsuit
against Quad9.
torrentfreak.com
