Unfortunately, playing predownloaded games early is a valid concern for Sony, and the alternative is to disable predownloads, and cause their servers to be packed more at release date.
And since all games copy to the hard drive from the disc (to make all games have downloadable versions) it impacts disc games. This is to let you transition to a download version of a borrowed disc game and keep your save.
Sony is not actually trying to be evil here, as evidenced by them deciding to leave the stores open. They can fix this on ps3 now with a final update to the firmware.
As soon as the last ps4 game is released, the same fix can be applied to that platform. But how would you fix this before then? The fix must let people predownload games and play them while offline, but prevent them from playing them before release date by wiping the battery, and manually setting the date after release.
A suit is the wrong way to go here. This was not planed obsolescence, it's a reasonable anti cheat and reasonable DRM that wasn't quite thought through.
Btw, adjusting the local time of the trophies before sync is not actually a valid solution to catch early trophies. Someone could wipe cmos, set the time forward, get trophies, then wipe cmos again, and it would set the obtained date back into the past. The only option is to completely delete all locally stored trophies that have not been synced when doing a clock resync and certification that changes the clock (but not timezone) by a significant amount.
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