What does the new PSN Terms of Service Agreement Contain?

The other I day powered on my PS3 for the first time in about a week to play a little 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution'.  And I was greeted with a prompt to accept the new PSN TOS before I could login.  Not a big deal since 'Deus Ex' doesn't feature online play.  But I do like to browser the PSN Store on occassion to see what's new.  So I decided to be a good little PS3 owner and do as I was being told by Sony.  Like many user's, I rarely read the entire TOS agreements.  Simply put they are long and drawn out.  And in the case of my situation, I have a smaller television and the small print this agreement is typed up in (and some game text as well) makes it absolute murder to read onscreen.  So, I scroll down and click on 'Accept'.

So what was in it that was so noteworthy I needed to accept it now?  Simply put, a little 'cover-their-butt' strategy by Sony.  In layman terms, the new Terms of Services agreement will prevent customer's from filing class-action lawsuits against Sony.  If you digg around enough there are a few loopholes to the new agreement, but if you want to play on their device you have to accept it.

So what about those involved in lawsuits for this past summer's PSN outage and data leak?  Those people aren't covered under this new TOS for that lawsuit since it occured before the new TOS was issued and put into action.

Here is where the red flag jumps out to me.  After this summer's issues that impacted not only Sony, but game publisher's market wide and customer's alike.  What has Sony discovered (if anything) that would cause them to go out of their way to issue this TOS now?  I would fully expect either something crazy to hit the headlines soon about a new internal issue or a drastic change to existing services that may impact customer's experience with their products?  Time will tell.

I love my PS3, and haven't had any real issues or qualms about Sony (with the exception the events from April/May 2011).  And one reason I jumped ship from the Xbox 360, is Sony doesn't charge for online access.  But with all the controversy flying around the last several months, I have to ask myself: "Is a single, dedicated platform for any service really that good of an idea?"

And my answer is "No".  It only benefits the companies behind the platform.  As demonstrated in April and May, a dedicated platform can be brought down and can greatly impact not only transactions and business conducted via the product, but also completely shut down the online portions of games people just wanted to play.  This is where PC gaming is mostly different.  Most PC games feature hosts for online playing.  Where the game servers are not dependent upon a e-commerce platform to operate.  So you may not be able to by a player skin for your character, but at least you can play.  I completely understand that this is not how Sony or Microsoft has setup either of their platforms, but moving forward maybe it is something that should at least be considered.