Playstation 3 The death of the PS3 before it's released???

Well, thank goodness it's only The Inquirer, which is hardly the most reliable of news sources. From claiming that all Xbox 360 games are single-threaded to claiming that Seti@Home will be closing down for good in less than a month, they can truly be relied upon to bring us most interesting bad news which fortunately turns out to be false. I have a feeling that this is a similar case. Sony realizes that not only would implementing this form of DRM cost them to simply implement, (the reader would have to be modified to have an appropriate marking laser) it would cost them popularity.

We, and they, have already seen what's happened to their pushes for DRM on the PC front; they've staged a full-scale retreat, with Microsoft leaping in to help clean up their mess. I think that this patent is really more of simply a relic of this push, and likely will never be implemented for comercial products. However, as it was mentioned above, this could be quite a viable method of protecting pre-release materials, review copies, and the like. It seems that Sony is finally waking up to the fact that restricting their honest customers isn't going to curb piracy, only anger their honest customers. However, this could be turned into a clever investment to stem pre-release leaks from the media, which has proven to be another incredibly infamous vulnerability of software. It would likely be quite worthwhile to implement it in that case.