Orange Lounge Radio

You are all educated gamers, for the most part, and no doubt have heard of the semi-famous online importing site Lik-Sang.com. Overall, a very nice site with a lot of selection and a good (albeit slightly inconsistent) track record.

Today, Lik-Sang is no more.

After several lawsuits pressed by Sony Entertainment of Europe over the sale of PSPs and potential PS3s in the UK and Europe, Lik-Sang has been forced to close its doors.

http://www.lik-sang.com/news.php?artc=3901

All credits will be refunded; all orders will be cancelled, money returned.

What now? Will Sony now close off every single online importer in order to secure their grasp of the UK and EU? Next, Play-asia? NCSX? Channel Beat!?!?

Bastards. That's all I have to say.

While I fear what this could portend for the future, I can't be too upset with lik-sang closing their doors. I ordered twice from them and each time they screwed up my order and refused to refund anything.
They sent my friend the wrong item, then refused to even talk to her about it!
I've been shopping play-asia for the past two years and had no problem. NCSX in a pinch, but man they run out of stuff quick.
But back to the topic, I still can't entirely figure out why the High Court found this unlawful. It sounds like something due to packaging the wrong power adapters, which wouldn't surprise me, but would be incredibly hard to prove. I'd be very interested to hear Sony's complaint, as this seems totally unfounded. My guess is that they don't want europeans importing their already tough to find systems, and that they don't want americans importing the cheaper japanese system, which is something I was kicking around.
All in all though, very distressing news, and I seriously hope that this doesn't set a precident...

I believe the EU has some laws relating to imports that are different than in the USA.

I mean, I'm pretty sure it's not illegal to import into the USA considering how many companies do it.

Perhaps it's because games are notoriously expensive in many parts of europe and asian versions can be found for much cheaper.

Eh, either way, I hope this doesn't scare importers away. Region locks annoy me and it's frustrating having to jump through hoops to get around them.

Sony is becoming some sort of anti-consumer consumer electronics company. They sue this company, one of my favorite importers, who is one of the few places European customers can get a PS3 from this year. They update their PSP firmware every month with very few features in exchange for temporarily disabling homebrew developer's boot methods. They're using the PS3 as a pawn in the format war between Blu-Ray and HDDVD, at the same time using Blu-Ray to justify a machine with comparable performance to an Xbox 360 but that costs $200 more. They once put a rootkit (basically a trojan) in their music CD's that would disable your CD-ROM drive when you tried to rip them.

Sony's always been very restrictive on their developers and what they can do with their games, for starters, the need for excessive prompts anytime a game accesses a memory card or tries to connect to the internet, or why a game has to be either a monthly fee MMORPG or a SOCOM game to be allowed to support downloadable patches and content. They prevented their PS2 HDD from being anywhere near the revolution they said it would be. The slim-line PS2's don't even support hard drives without modifications.

Let's not forget Sony is one of the founding members of the RIAA and the MPAA, who actively campaign to limit how you can get your music and movies and what you can do with them, not to mention they act as cartels who use their overwhelming marketshare to set unreasonably high prices for CD's, DVD's, and movie tickets.

Every time I hear about them, it's from them shooting their business in the foot. You know all those Sony boycotts we hear about? Do they make sense to you now? Vote with your wallets, guys.

Although this does suck that Sony is closing a game importer like Lik-Sang im not upset to tell you the truth... I may get bashed for this but im more so happy to see Lik-Sang go since they screwed me out of my money twice (wont say how much) and my friend too ($150 at least from him)...

Ive been using Play-asia since and im happy with it... And if Sony moves on to stop them then ill find someplace else... And if it happens again then so on and so forth... Places like that will keep poping up to take the other ones place no matter how much Sony tries to stop them...

hitstun wrote:They once put a rootkit (basically a trojan) in their music CD's that would disable your CD-ROM drive when you tried to rip them.

Every time I rip a trojan it totally kills my drive.

Teeheehee.

Boycott DRM
Defective by Design is a wonderfully amusing and informative site.

Lik-Sang wrote: Sony have failed to disclose to the London High Court that not only the world wide gaming community in more than 100 countries relied on Lik-Sang for their gaming needs, but also Sony Europe's very own top directors repeatedly got their Sony PSP hard or software imports in nicely packed Lik-Sang parcels with free Lik-Sang Mugs or Lik-Sang Badge Holders, starting just two days after Japan's official release, as early as 14th of December 2004 (more than nine months earlier than the legal action)

What an excellent way to go out. Apparently they were for "research purposes only". Here's the original article on their site, and here's the BBC article with Sony's response.

Hitstun- That was a very interesting post. I have to confess that I don't know much about EU importing/copyright laws, but your post was a great read. Makes me feel very fortunate, but pissed at Sony. Man, they really just grind the EU under their boot!
And thanks for the link VxJasonxV, that is an extremely worthwhile and great site.
I really hope that Sony starts paying attention to what it's consumers want, instead of telling them what they want. Some of their Guerilla copyright protection is just insane.
I feel pretty safe with Play-Asia though, they've been around for many years, and have a good rep. IIRC, Lik-Sang has had some legal trouble in the past, and I know SSJ100Matt and I and friends have all lost money from their shoddy business structure. If Sony goes after Play-Asia though, they'll have a war on their hands. That'd definately be enough for me to boycott anything they touch.
Not that they're really making it tough right now, but still.