AT&T ruling prompted Sony TOS changes - report
Sony rep attributes controversial move to recent US Supreme Court ruling
A representative of Sony has attributed the controversial changes to the PSN's terms of service to a US Supreme Court ruling in favour of telecoms company AT&T.
The changes effectively prevent PSN users from launching any joint legal action against the company - widely seen as a response to the class action lawsuits that followed the protracted PSN outage earlier this year.
In an e-mail to CNN, an unnamed Sony representative cited a recent case involving AT&T charging state taxes for mobile phone services advertised as being free.
"The Supreme Court recently ruled in the AT&T case that language like this is enforceable. The updated language in the TOS is designed to benefit both the consumer and the company by ensuring that there is adequate time and procedures to resolve disputes."
However, interactive entertainment lawyer Alex Chapman told GamesIndustry.biz that the language used in the changes is unlikely to be enforceable in the UK under the Unfair Contracts terms Act.
"It is probably not the UK that Sony is worried about, but the USA where class actions are more common place and the system can mean that defending those actions can be so time consuming and expensive that it is more cost effective to settle even spurious claims."