Ha! Well that didn’t take long. Sony has now officially sued the folks behind the PS3 hack, Geohot and fail0verflow. This is good news for Sony’s lawyers, and bad news for pretty much everyone else, particularly those of you who still believe the quaint notion of hardware ownership or anything like that. Foolish!
There’s not too much going here. Sony alleges, in the United States District Court in Northern California, that Geohot & Co.: have violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, specifically with reference to the clause that deals with circumventing access control; have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (which basically means they accessed a computer with getting permission); have contributed to the WANTON~! copyright infringement of PS3s everywhere; and have violating the PlayStation Network’s Terms of Service.
TOS’d, to use computer vernacular from the mid-1990s.
Right now Sony wants the court to force Geohot & Co. to stop distributing any and all software related to the hack, and to turn over any equipment used in the cracking of the PS3’s security.
A couple things: one, how convenient for Sony (and any other company, it’s not like Sony is doing anything anyone else wouldn’t have done) to develop rubbish security protocol and then be able to sue when these protocols are exposed. Two, a big laughing-at-loud at the idea of being able to stuff this security exploit back in its little box.
It’s like what we saw with Wikileaks: the idea that you can reverse the flow of time to a point when information wasn’t known is simply laughable in this Internet Age. I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing—and I certainly don’t want people to think I’m encouraging folks to go out and hack their PS3, then rip games from GameFly or whatever—I’m just saying that’s how things work these days.
So again, I suppose Sony has every right to do what they’re doing, I just happen to fall on the “hacker spirit” side of the discussion when it comes to cases like this.
Never mind that it’s simply too late to prevent this information from spreading all over the place.