Sony seems prepared to unleash a new tool in its never-ending battle against game pirates, using measured load times, of all things, to detect certain illegitimate copies of its games. Sony’s patent for “Benchmark measurement for legitimate duplication validation” was filed way back in August 2011, but it was only published by the US patent office late last week. The patent describes a method for a system that would measure load times for games loaded into a system against a previously measured threshold for what those load times ought to be on a standard, unmodified game and system: For example, if an authentic game title is distributed exclusively on [Blu-ray discs] having a total benchmark load time of 45 seconds on a game console BD drive, the acceptable range of load times could be from 40 to 50 seconds. Thus, a total measured title load time of four seconds would be outside of the acceptable range of total load times for a legitimate media type. Even if the pirated media results in similar overall load times to the original media (if a hacker added an intentional delay, for instance, or if a pirated game on a hard drive loaded similarly to an authentic game on a flash drive), the method described in the patent also measures load times for individual segments of the game code to detect fraudulent copies. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony patent application measures load times to detect pirated games