Sony has been very active for years on the subject of piracy. To go further, the company imagines, in a patent, a technology that detects pirate applications on televisions and TV boxes by placing them on a blacklist to block them.
Even with the arrival of SVoD and cloud gaming, piracy has a bright future ahead of it, including on televisions and TV boxes. Evidenced by the success of football matches viewable through IPTV services in France. If the Arcom has multiplied the blockages and that users are more and more discouraged, there are still many methods to circumvent them. Sony therefore wants to take the lead and intervene before the blockages put in place by ISPs, by preventing illegal services from functioning on televisions and multimedia boxes.
Sony has a new idea to prevent piracy: create an app blacklist
It’s the media TorrentFreak which teaches us that Sony has applied for a patent for technology to detect and blacklist pirate apps on media players and smart TVs “. With this patent called ” Anti-piracy control based on blacklist function the manufacturer would like to implement monitoring software integrated into the operating system that detects third-party hacking applications and could block them.
Sony writes that ” the monitoring application has system privileges to examine the code and execution of the third-party application installed on the electronic device “. This technology would be useful on devices that allow users to install apps without going through official stores. In another case, it would identify the installation of an application via a third-party store.
Good luck Sony!
The objective is to protect users against piracy of their devices, but also and above all to protect the content of rights holders, such as the official broadcasters of a football championship. Among the detection methods, the patent specifies that Sony’s technology could use ” monitoring external network sources that apps have access to, for example, or directly inspecting an app’s code “, writing TorrentFreak.
If this patent obviously does not guarantee that Sony will deploy this technology one day, the fact remains that piracy is a major concern for the company. However, remember that the fight against piracy is an old obsession of tech players. But hackers always seem to stay one step ahead or be extra resourceful to circumvent blockages. The task is therefore far from being won in advance.
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