Sony: No Grey Areas

Following a UK High Court success last week in which Sony was able to get a ruling stopping Hong Kong-based games retailer, Lik-Sang, selling Asia-sourced PSPs to European consumers via the Internet and, well, free trade in the global market, the company is preparing to flex more legal muscle as we wait the PS3 launch… next March.

SPOnG is unclear how SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) is going to monitor the more affluent aficionados of SPOnG popping over to Akihabara Denki Gai and picking up a PS3 in November.

We do, however, understand from a statement made by ‘a spokesman’ to the BBC, that Sony only really has the best interests of its European consumers at heart. "Ultimately, we're trying to protect consumers from being sold hardware that does not conform to strict EU or UK consumer safety standards,” says the unnamed source.

However, on the off-chance that those same European consumers decided to take their lives in their hands in the period between the Japanese launch on November 11th, the American launch on the 17th, and the European launch on… well, sometime in March, SCEE is being even more protective. “The law is clear, and grey importing PS2, PSP or PS3 into the EU, without the express permission of SCEE is illegal.

"Therefore, we will utilise the full scope of the law to put a stop to any retailers who chose to do this,” the spokesperson pointed out, caringly.

All this consumer protection is bringing a huge droplet of saline to SPOnG’s news desk this week – and it’s not tears.

The only thing we don’t feel protected from, in fact, are PS3 gamers in non-PAL territories who will be pointing their combined fingers and screaming, “Loser!” at us for the four months separating their legal purchases and ours.

We are also under the impression that the heads-down, breathless sprint to globalisation, free markets and unhindered trade is being somewhat crippled by legal judgements in single courts that don’t enable us to consume globally in a free market.

There would appear, even to the most economically absent-minded, to be a double-standard in operation here. On the one hand corporations cry foul when local governance issues (such as what to pay people) are seen to ‘nanny’. On the other hand, those same legal instruments are readily plucked when it comes to one regional wing of a company battling the other.

You might expect Sony Europe to get on the video-link to Sony Japan and simply ask their Asian counterparts to control inventory in such a way as to stop exports. You might.

The reality, however, is that both business units are separate and are competing. As one source close to the industry pointed out to SPOnG today, “if you’re head of a regional office and you want to be head of the whole damn company, you need to sell more stuff than the other region. They are the enemy”.