PlayStation loses legal fight to prevent third party add-ons being sold for its games

Sony has lost its fight to prevent third party add-ons being sold for PlayStation games.

The European Court of Justice has dismissed Sony’s claim that the Action Replay cheat software sold by UK company Datel infringed its copyright.

PlayStation asserted that as Datel’s boosts use its source code, the company was infringing its copyright under EU law. The case was first taken to court back in 2012.

According to EuroNews, judges said that Datel’s cheats do “not change or reproduce either the object code, the source code, or the internal structure and organisation of Sony’s software”, but “merely changes the content of the variables temporarily transferred by Sony’s games to the console’s RAM, which are used during the running of the game”.

“The directive protects only the intellectual creation as it is reflected in the text of the computer program’s source code and object code,” the court said.

“The Court finds that the content of the variable data transferred by a computer program to the RAM of a computer and used by that program in its running does not fall within the protection specifically conferred by that directive, in so far as that content does not enable such a program to be reproduced or subsequently created.”

In a non-binding opinion prepared for the case earlier this year, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar insisted it was not illegal to use any copyrighted work in a way that may differ from the creator’s intentions.

“The author of a detective novel cannot prevent the reader from skipping to the end of the novel to find out who the killer is, even if that would spoil the pleasure of reading and ruin the author’s efforts to maintain suspense,” Szpunar said.

Yesterday we reported that former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden – who served as CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America and chairman of Worldwide Studios before leaving the company in 2019 – was asked if the console industry’s current business model was sustainable, given the increasing development costs associated with the ongoing pursuit of incrementally more powerful hardware.

“We’ve done these things this way for 30 years,” Layden replied, “every generation those costs went up and we realigned with it. We’ve reached the precipice now, where the centre can’t hold, we cannot continue to do things that we have done before.”