Err, well I expect this feature to be cut in short order. For those that don't remember "Playstation Home" was originally conceived, and promoted as, being pretty much an entirely free version of "Second Life" that would be attached to all of your PS-3 systems. It was going to allow people to create their own content, as well as record
and stream videos. Immediately Sony started backpedaling on this when it started to think about it, going from freedom to "well, it will be like Second Life without all the naked people in the sky" which is almost a direct quote. Then it went from that to the removal of all user generated content since Sony could not only not police it, but also realized that it would be better for them to make all the money from microtransactions by selling avatar customization, furniture, and other assorted things. Video recording and streaming followed shortly there after, along with other features like being able to attach yourself as a rider to someone else's game, or say play a PS-3 game with the display miniaturized to fit on a TV screen in your "Home" Apartment so other people as Avatars could watch... and yeah well, the bottom line is that even if some of this happened later (and I'm not sure if it did) it all seemed to get axed before release so I went from being fairly excited to never even loading up the "Home" Feature.
The point here being that Sony has a history of promising people all kinds of neat features and freedom, but then not delivering on it, and cutting it away one piece at a time. Whether it's intentional... generating a lot of hype for things they never plan to deliver and hoping the audience more or less stays intact if they remove the features and promises slowly enough, or genuine and simply falls apart as corporate paranoia sets in, I do not know. Analyzing what can and will be done with a feature like this is pointless because it smacks of exactly the kind of thing Sony promises and then never delivers on in the long run.
As far as the whole set if "Let's Play" controversies go, well all I can say is that I tend to lump the entire thing into the category of general gaming industry douchebaggery at this point. Microsoft is already being careful to avoid claiming they are selling anything, as opposed to "licensing" in their ads and promotions, so there is no expectation of control or ownership, and the entire industry seems to be adopting similar attitudes and personas. At the end of the day they are out to attack anything that anyone does with their properties that they do not directly control, using any justification they can to pretty much turn gaming into an intellectual police state. To be honest I suspect it's going to snowball, if they win on the whole "Let's Play" issue, and let's be honest... they will, because guys making video playthroughs of games for fun generally don't have the resources to fight corporate lawyers, I expect the precedents from those victories to be creatively interpreted and used as a springboard to attack reviewers and critics who reveal or show anything about a game without their permission when it casts them in a negative light. After all if it's established someone doing a LP is violating the laws by showing the whole game without permission, it's only a small step to turn that into parts of the game legally... and that means any mention of the plot, characters, etc... or use of it's graphics or music without permission, even those from trailers, could potentially be a violation. Once the precedent gets established all it takes is a dedicated legal team to keep rolling it along to more ridiculous extremes.
