Some clever investigative work by a member of the NeoGaf forum may have unearthed a new piracy detection method that will be used on the PS4.
Sony apparently has a patent application that detects whether a game is pirate or not by testing the loading time of the game.
For a typical BD version of the game that is benchmarked to take on average certain amount of time to load, the system will detect if the game is loaded far too quickly because it has been launched from pirated media or from a hard-drive. Games that are downloaded and authenticated via PSN will similarly have its own load time profile, and that if the actual loading and authentication time is too quick, it could also indicate some funny business is going on.
This latest patent application follows the story of another anti-piracy related patent application by Sony, in which embedded RFID tags are used to limit where a game disc can be used.
Home
