ed

Not so much. There might be Muslims who didn't mind the Qur'an being used as background music in a game (such as, for instance, the musician himself), but there's no group out there that would insist it be used for such a purpose.

"WHY DID NO ONE CARE WHEN THE SONG WAS RELEASED?"

Because no one had heard of it, and it wasn't being used in a game they might want to let their children play, or play themselves.

"WHY DOES NO ONE CARE THAT THE SONG IS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD RIGHT NOW ON ITUNES AND AMAZON?"

It's easy enough to simply not download the song. Going without LBP is a different matter.

Even if they took legal action, it's doubtful it would have gone anywhere.

The potential downside could have been hundreds of millions of people boycotting not just LBP or the Playstation brand, but *ALL* Sony products. Even if chance of that happening wasn't that high, it's still there. When you run a major multinational corporation like Sony, you don't take risks like that without a very good reason. Avoiding a one-week delay in LBP's release is not a very good reason.

Ok, except no one sued Sony to try to legally force them to take the song out. They did it on their own. Therefore talking about "freedom of speech" in this situation is silly.

Removing a song from LBP is a much more minor change than taking that Resistance gun battle out of the church.

He's a physician. How exactly does that give him more expertise on the matter than other people?

This guy is best described as a native informant. It's no more of a surprise that he's upset at LBP being delayed than it is that a bunch of non-religious or Christian gamers are upset at it being delayed. The MCB or ISNA are more representative organizations. (Of course, it's fair to ask, representative of what? AIFD is more representative of Republican-leaning atheists from an Islamic background, perhaps. MCB and ISNA are more representative of people who actually had some chance of being offended by LBP in the first place.)

They're both right. If the song were just left in, some people would have been offended enough to participate in a boycott of all Sony products, for example. However, the total number of such people would be less than a billion. Maybe just a couple hundred million.

A patch would probably have been enough, but I guess you never know. Once the unpatched disks are out in circulation, they could end up being played on PS3's not connected to the Internet for years to come.

Oregon State

I think a patch is fine, but *my* PS3 is connected to the Internet. This is SCEE, after all, who demanded a Blu-ray version of Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty. The delay for LBP's release is certainly an annoyance, but you guys will all get over it sometime in the next year or so. SCEE is thinking there's a large class of people who might buy this game for their kids to play on a non-connected PS3 who will be deeply offended once they happen to hear this song play, offended enough to take away their kids' PS3's and not consider purchasing any product from Sony Computer Entertainment for decades. The amount of time that would have passed since LBP's release would create the impression that SCEE does not consider the matter a big enough deal to do anything about, even if the real reason is that they should put their PS3's on the internet.

As far as the question of why no one cared until now, to me it makes sense. This band and their music, on their own, have a very narrow appeal, whereas when the music is included in LBP, it becomes part of a product that should have very broad appeal. The band is fine with the offended millions simply not giving them any business; Sony is not.