As most people know, Sony's new online community for the PlayStation 3 (dubbed Home) should be available sometime in October if all goes as planned. One concern some may have had is "what if someone starts harassing others or putting up stuff they shouldn't"?

Well, at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival happening now Sony has answered that concern. Peter Edward, the director of the Home project, told an audience users that consistently abuse the service can find their PS3's banned from Home and going online altogether. They would, in effect, have to buy themselves a new PS3 to get online again.

Sony has no intentions of becoming virtual cops. Instead, areas will be made available to users based on their age which will help target advertising toward appropriate age groups.

"Ultimately we know a user's details, we know machine details and we know where they live," said Edward

"If you really feel like you've been abused or that someone has just shown wholly inappropriate behaviour then you are able to complain about it. If you really, really misbehave you can have your console disconnected at a machine level, so you would actually have to move house and buy a new PS3 before you could get online again.

"Clearly that's not something we would want to be doing very often but as a disincentive to mess round too much it's in our power," he admitted.

"It's a hard line to draw because we don't want to be walking around telling everyone off for saying 'bloody' so we've got to strike a balance there," said Edward.

"We're going to be relying on users assessing what's appropriate to them – if they've been subject to behaviour they don't like they can complain about it rather than we walk around as virtual police."

Sony expects the community to police itself with tools available to block any potential troublemakers.

The presentation included some branding from Durex, Marlboro and Bacardi. Sony has no intentions of "sanitizing" Home and mature players can expect to see the same sort of branding one would see in the real world.

"It's relatively simple to be confident that somebody is over 18. So it's no problem to have areas that are only open to those aged 18 years' and over. We are able to do that quite comprehensively, we have access to the log-in data that they use for the PlayStation Network," offered Edward.

"Undoubtedly there are going to be some things and some brands that we are not going to want to be involved in the environment at any stage.

"But a large proportion of our demographic is over 18 so we will make a point of catering to that demographic – we certainly don't want to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator," he said.