I sold to a friend who needed a blueray player and his PS3 died so it worked out.  No big deal.

I read somewhere alot of users also bought the camera for the PS4 so in the end the difference is not that much between the two.  

Apparently you can also trade in your x360 as well.  I guess they figured most xbox users who wants to trade up would do it anyways and they want to migrate PS3 users by giving them an incentive.  Personally I think they should just drop the price by $100 since I don't know what they would do with all the old PS3's anyways.  This is not much different than what alot of phone companies in Canada do where they take competitor's old phones and give you some credit for your purchase - usually much lower than what you can get by selling on craigslist yourself.  It just makes it easier for people who can't be bothered to do so. 

Why by default? Smaller companies can't make a case against a larger one? That seems counter intuitive to me and seemingly only actually serves the interest of the larger companies who are above reproach by their lesser competitors.

Well bigger corporarions have much more money to spend on ads. Smaller one's may not be able to fight back as effectively. For example we had an electricity company taken over by a german one some time ago and one of their smaller competitors aired commercials about their clients paying a foreign company and that they should choose a local one instead.

That didn't get appreciated one bit and they were in court soon after. They had to rectify the commercial and pay a large fine in the end.

always fun when people think they have to defend "their" company with photoshop as reaction to the other company's action.

only sad part is that some really seem to buy a ps4 because of 60fps and 1080p and not because of "i like killzone and gt more than halo and forza"

See, that goes straight to my point. A smaller and native company was shut up by a larger and richer company in court. The policy you speak of allows bigger companies to force smaller ones to keep quiet for fear of being penalized with huge legal burdens that only a larger company could afford.

Big companies know how that works and will most likely shut up smaller competitors before they even get to court. Seems it would be fairer to allow that type of advertising than not.

Oh PS3 fans do get the PS4 because of it's exclusives. It's the formerly 360 guys that are buying the PS4 because it's a better console. make no mistake about that.

Without backward compatibility my PS3 has plenty of use for years to come (Tales and Persona come to mind).

Otherwise, no issue with the promotion by Microsoft or the ribbing by the joke ad.

It's not an example of bigger company shutting them down, they shut them down because they were mud slinging, not because they had more money. EU courts hate big corporations almost automatically. The way we see it, if you want to advertise compare your products to your former ones. Nothing more.

The only ones making comparisons between different products are constument programms which have no financial gains or backing from ANY company.