Sony Has A Patent Filing For Determining Whether A Game Is Pirated From Its Various Load Times

TSA Staff 24 Comments

In 2011 Sony filed a patent for determining whether a game is pirated based on its load times.

It’s an interesting idea – it basically monitors certain known load times per game (perhaps time to get to the Start screen, or to load the first level) and then checks them against a central database. If the load times differ by too much, the game is blocked.

Or, crucially, the user is blocked.

The patent is quite specific. “For example, if an authentic game title is distributed exclusively on BDs having a total benchmark load time of 45 seconds on a game console BD drive, the acceptable range of load times could be from 40 to 50 seconds,” it says. “Thus, a total measured title load time of 4 seconds would be outside of the acceptable range of total load times for a legitimate media type.”

It also tracks seek times (so it gets around those using USB sticks) and data throughput. It’s not limited to Blu-ray games, either, the patent highlights way to do a similar job with PSN downloads.

An interesting tactic. Whether this is for PS4 or not isn’t known, but it’s certainly likely. Sony’s PS3 encryption was hacked with considerable effect, but this looks like being able to manage the whole situation better than just relying on private and public keys.

Thanks GAF.

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24 Comments

  1. To be honest, just having a bar code like thing on the disc would be the best way to avoid piracy, add a bar code to all the next gen games discs where the PS4 can somehow scan it and make sure that the bar code matches the game.

    Surely something like that would work better than telling load times.

    • But I guess it would be easy to print off a bar code that matches the code in the pirated game data.

  2. How about a dirty disc?

  3. Sounds clever, as long as it works in practice. I can see people being banned innocently, and I guess it’s hard to prove that just because it’s loading is slow, it’s a pirated game.

  4. Just when I was planning getting an SSD disk for my PS4.

  5. Highly doubt load times are going to be coded into a OS. Any console that plays pirated games isn’t taken online by majority of the people so this is a useless feature.

  6. What wonderous limitations the next generation shall bring.. ;)

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