>Why on earth would anyone want to encourage their behaviour

Sony is now effectively a financial services (insurance) company, so it doesn't matter what happens with hardware. It's kind of a loss leader for them, like the Macintosh hardware at Apple.

Practically speaking, this will only have a significant effect on those unfortunate children whose parents dig up one of these obscure characters for use in a personal name, as there is an increased chance that other people will not be able to read the person's name, or will read it improperly.

Imagine the irritation at having the FEDEX guy always misread your name when he hands you a parcel.

That is, if you wanted to name your child using one of these characters yesterday, your application would have been rejected at city hall. Today, as a result of this decision, the clerks will probably have to accept the name, no matter how obscure.

In summary, this is good for parents and bad for children.