Is this piracy?

[Automobili3XF]

You know Mercado Livre, the latin-american eBay? There's a lot of people selling PS3 keys for ridiculously low price on this platform.

I found out about this years ago, but just a few weeks ago i decided to try one out since i have a PS3, i picked up a cheap one to test (DMC Trilogy Remastered, about US$2), and, as it turns out, it works!

But here's how it works: You pay the seller, he then contacts you via e-mail and gives you acess to another e-mail tied to a PSN account with the game registered. From there, you log this account on your PS3, download the game and simply leave said account logged on the system, you don't even need to come back to it.

Is this legal? Or is it a piracy of sorts? 

As far as i can tell, most of those simply work, i bought two games like this so far.

Here's some examples, just so you can see how cheap these games are:

https://goo.gl/q21wG0

https://goo.gl/H1vtUU

https://goo.gl/9B2qZD

https://goo.gl/1RAXhJ

[Oshino Shinobu]

It's technically not piracy, but it's not particularly legal either. It's certainly against PSN's terms of service, but that doesn't make it inherently illegal, more of a grey area. 

 

Either way, it's a bit dodgy. 

[Droidbot]

Super common, hacked accs. Can't be patched on the PS3 without radical changes to that antiquated platform. 

[Automobili3XF]

22 minutes ago, Droidbot said:

Super common, hacked accs. Can't be patched on the PS3 without radical changes to that antiquated platform. 

And i bet Sony will never fix this issue, they don't give a damn about the old console...

[Beef Boss]

Just now, Chevy_Monsenhor said:

And i bet Sony will never fix this issue, they don't give a damn about the old console...

Why would they. They stopped caring for multi-player online PS2.