Sony Admits Little It Can Do Over PlayStation2 DVD Bug

30-Mar-00

Sony said Thursday, March 30, 2000 that it was powerless to stop consumers watching supposedly restricted foreign-made DVD movies on their PlayStation2 games consoles, despite announcing a recall to fix the problem. Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) said late Wednesday it would provide modified software to the owners of 1.25 million PlayStation2s which had been manufactured with the glitch on a CD-ROM program. ""Obviously we'd like as many to come in as possible but we'll have to see what the consumer reaction is,"" said SCEI spokesman Benjamin Guernsey. ""There's very little we can do,"" he acknowledged. ""Basically we can't go out and seek out the consumers."" The 39,800-yen (370-dollar) PlayStation2 has been advertised not just as a computer games machine but also the cheapest DVD-Video player on the Japanese market. Under an international agreement with the DVD Forum and the Motion Picture Association of America, movies on digital video disc (DVD) are meant to be seen only after their release in six specific regions. Restrictions embedded in DVD players are meant to prevent consumers watching DVDs produced outside their region until they are locally released. The aim is to prevent a Hollywood movie being seen on DVD in Japan, for example, before its debut on the big screen. But SCEI has admitted that if any button is pressed at the right time when a DVD is being loaded, the PlayStation2 will override the restrictions. Guernsey said consumers would have an incentive to bring in their faulty CD-ROM utility disks despite losing the ability to watch foreign-made DVDs, as the new ones would give superior audio quality. DVD copyright holders were not up in arms over the problem, he added. ""At this point we've described the situation to them and at this point we've not received any demands for compensation. You never know what might happen in the future, but so far there's been no complaints,"" he said. SCEI started producing corrected versions of the software accompanying the PlayStation2 consoles last Monday, the spokesman said. It is the second glitch to be reported this month after the company admitted some of its memory cards which plug in to the PlayStation2 to save games were faulty. SCEI sold as many as 600,000 PlayStation2s in a matter of hours after the console hit Japanese stores on March 4. Source: Agence France-Presse