The war against common sense ownership rights continues:

Echoing the controversial measures announced by Ubisoft last month, Sony has revealed that users of SOCOM: US Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3 will need to register their game online before they are able to access the multiplayer component of the title.

It gets worse:

Furthermore, in a nod to recent plans implemented by EA, anyone buying a pre-owned copy of the game will be forced to cough up $20 to obtain a code to play online.

I brought up books in the title because e-books could run into the same kind of "no sharing" buzzsaw - which would be very different from the centuries long practice of passing books around we have now (Jasper Fforde touched on this in "The Well of Lost Plots", actually - you have to read it to see how, because explaining it would give away too much of the story).

Anyway, on games - we trade games back and forth with friends (once a game is done, it's usually done). The industry apparently wants that practice to stop. Like book sharing, I don't think it's costing anyone real money, but, like DRM for music, it's a bad idea that lots of industry types have gone "all in" on. Great.

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