Re: He needs to escalate it (@AC)
"That could comfortably put a six figure dent in Sony if they're not careful, and it seems that would be richly deserved."
While I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of your post, I must disagree with the last sentence. When a big company acts the way Sony has done here, it's because they know that 99.99% of claimants will bend over and 'pay the man' just to recover the rest of their content -which in this case is being held hostage by Sony- and escape the hassles of a legal claim or a complaint to Trading standards.
Of course the only way for us customers to prevent this is to make the issue as public as possible and exercise our legal rights to their full extent, including also asking for damages for the time the user can't access his content.
It would be even better if the existence of abusive clauses in EULAs -like the ones discussed here- caused the company to be automatically fined by Trading Standards or similar bodies. Yeah, I'll keep on dreaming. :-(
Biting the hand that feeds IT
