I don't think that Sony would do something this drastic. We would see baby steps of it happening before like online passes or blocking out trophies if the game is used before we should even consider this happening.

Release an sku without an optical drive?
http://www.techspot.com/news/47737-source-claims-xbox-720-will-ship-without-optical-drive.html
Old rumor anyway.

I can see this being very bad. But as well there are times when MS says digital distribution is the future and thought about eliminating physical media. So how do we borrow or sell our digital games? In the end its all bad and Sony shouldnt be using this either if they consider.

I think all/most game developers don't like the used game market because these gamers have demonstrated their willingness to pay money for their game and yet the developers/publishers don't get any benefit from it. With that said, companies have to be careful about the measures they take to "kill" second hand games because it will (probably) result in some negative impacts on gamers that will (likely) anger them. For example, like many people I want to be able to use the same disk in my friend/family's system without having to jump through hoops.

With that said, I think the best approach to kill second hand games is to move people towards digital distribution. If people can pick up a 6 month old game for $30, a year old game for $20, and a 2 year old game for $10 it should have a significant impact on the second-hand market without impacting gamers in a negative way.

It doesn't mean Sony is going to use the patent. its just there for if someone else wants to use a feature like that they'll have to pay sony to do it?

I think there are alot of angry, bitter people who can't handle the PS3 as the #1 selling console. It's like bluray success and PS3 success were something that just weren't "supposed" to happen this gen after all the struggles Sony had early on.

So now you have every little thing picked apart, in a futile attempt to create negative press for Sony. Talk about the stock, or the companies other ventures... There's nothing you can say about hardware sales lol.

#facts

I think there are a lot of people who have an irrational hatrid of all of the console manufacturers and, while I think some of the criticism may be driven by this, I don't think the dislike of this idea is driven by that.

Most heavy-weight DRM systems that have been tried by a variety of game developers in the past decade have come with negative consequences to legitimate game owners and left a very bad taste in people's mouths. While Sony hasn't been guilty of this recently, Sony has made some significant mistakes like this; for example the Sony-Rootkit which (essentially) installed a virus on users' computers when they foolishly tried to play their music on their PC.

Now, I don't know if Sony will actually implement this but I think people are a little more worried about this from Sony compared to other companies in part because their management has been a little tone-deaf to user-rights issues in the past.

Lots of things are patented that never ever come to pass. It's an idea. Maybe they'll go through with it, maybe they won't. Chillax.

Already posted. Locking.