Sony did not publish a customer service policy this month. Sony filed a warning.
Sony says it will call the police on customers who cross a line it wrote for itself. It didn’t write a policy against harassment. It wrote one against persistence — asking twice, showing up, organizing, wanting more than Sony offered the first time. It calls this protection for employees. It’s protection for Sony.
The timing gives it away: Sony spent the summer in two courtrooms — one calling its disc shutdown a monopoly move, one calling its “Buy” button a lie — losing ground in both, then decided the real problem was tone.
A company cannot lose a fight over honesty and win one over etiquette in the same season without someone noticing which fight it actually wants to have. The fight over honesty is slow, expensive, and already going badly. The fight over etiquette is free, and Sony gets to pick the referee.
Sony calls the harassment policy a response to abuse. Nobody is arguing Sony’s staff deserve abuse. But a policy broad enough to cover persistent demands, online criticism, and repeated requests for compensation doesn’t read like a shield for employees — it reads like a filter for customers still angry about the disc decision and the licensing language. It doesn’t distinguish a threat from the same unanswered question asked a fourth time. Vagueness like that, in a document this carefully worded, is the point.
A company confident in the license agreement lets the lawsuit run and answers the complaint on the record. Sony wrote a policy instead — one that lets it stop answering the complaint at all.
Sony’s lawyers are telling courts that customers misunderstood what they bought. Sony’s press office is telling the same customers to mind their manners while that misunderstanding gets sorted out. Both cannot be sincere — one is cover for the other, and it isn’t the harassment policy that needs defending. If customers misunderstood a revocable license, they don’t need a conduct policy for asking about it. If they understood it fine and are furious anyway, Sony’s problem was never their tone.
Somebody at Sony finally noticed customers stopped asking politely. Instead of asking why, Sony wrote a rule against it.
Source context: Yahoo Finance
“Manners Beat Accountability” audio version
© 2026 Acclaimed James. All rights reserved.
