 An attempt to patent an innovative file sharing system from Sony have been denied by the UK Patent office. In an answer from the patent office, after translation from a somewhat criptic language, unless you're an english lawyer, we understood that Sony is trying to introduce in the market a new media file sharing & social networking system which is supposed to collect information about the users collecting and redistributing the media, posing a big threat over the principle of p2p, anonymity.
We are talking about a system because it is probably related to some hardware device, as we could understand from the document. The patent was refused because it was not introducing "novelty": whether you do it in software or in hardware, it's not something new, except for the programming that lies within, which is not subject to patent. While this seems to let us think Sony is about to release a new box (sorry, a new station) dealing with multimedia, and that it looks like Sony believes p2p will be at the heart of the future media market, some questions are rising among the community. Those questions are obviously not directed on who is the beneficiary of the information, which is quite clear indeed. Rather, the issues regards whether it is a possibilty for the sharer to understand and block the information collected. Way too many times we've seen collecting "too much information" from legitimate software also coming from big firms, and Sony is .. ehm.. not in the right position to be trusted. The fact is that if this information will be used to attest that, after giving some recommendations for music listening or critics on movies, Foo Bar user will be entitled as "expert recommender" is contrasting with the suggestions made that the whole architecture is purely peer to peer. The whole point is that people are willing to redistribute content if they are sure that noone, after a certain period of time, can link them to the content. That's it. And by the way, forget about being anonymous when you share. All the people that download from you can be easily spotted from the IP numbers connected to your pc. And writing a software that tracks all those info is really easy whatever the language you'd like to use.
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