Sony has decided to take the Apple route and is taking George "GeoHot" Hotz, the hacker who was able to crack the PS3 with his own form of jailbreaking, and the fail0verflow team to court and they are taking all of his computers and drives to court for full access.
As part of the case Sony was granted a temporary restraining order. Basically, Sony has forced Hotz to have to pull all his links from his site that details all of his work with the PS3 and pass over all of his gear to the court. That includes and discs, USB flash drives, and workstations he owns and uses.
Of course his work is still out there on dozens of sites that have already posted his work for all to see. Sony is just using their big muscles to push the guy around and trap him into a corner.
George Hotz was not even trying to create a way to pirate games for the PS3 but bring back the feature that Sony took away early last year, the addition of a second OS. His homebrew technique doesn't even allow a pirated game to play.
Late last year George was able to crack the encryption on the PS3 to allow him to be able to run his own code. He was able to bring back the Linux OS installation that Sony had been blocking.
Jailbreaking iPhones have now become legal. This is technically the same thing. The restrictions that Sony has put in place to be able to load apps that Sony does not offer is similar to those that Apple put in place for the iPhone. Federal law has already proven that it doesn't break the copyright and does not violate the terms in which Sony has released the hardware. The biggest hurdle will be for Sony to prove that Hotz cracked the code knowing that he would open up the PS3 to possible piracy.
It's sad that Sony is really going through all this effort to destroy this kid. The only thing left for them to do is to burst into his house with SWAT and confiscate all his gear in evidence crates. You never know...
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