In case you haven’t been following this story, last week Sony announced that it would be suing famed computer hacker George “Geohot” Hotz as well as a group of hackers working under the team name “failOverflow.” Hotz, who is well-known in the hacker world for being the first person to jailbreak Apple’s iPhone, with his failOverflow team recently cracked the encryption codes to Sony’s current generation video game console, PlayStation 3 (PS3). The defendants then created their own respective software programs that would allow the PS3 to run unsigned software not authorized by Sony.
The significance of this feat is huge since it would not only allow software developers to bypass Sony’s content filters and run their own programs on the PS3, but more importantly it would also potentially allow video game piracy to run rampant on the system. This would be a huge hit against Sony as piracy has been estimated to already account for a large portion of lost profits to the company handheld gaming system, the PlayStation Portable (PSP).
Though software piracy is already possible on the PS3, Sony is hoping to nip it in the bud by filing suit against the defendants. Sony charges defendants with a number of causes of actions including violating provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and various other federal computer fraud laws. Without getting too deep into the legal nitty gritty, essentially Sony is seeking to stop the spread of the cracked code, which have already been released onto the internet.
Anyone notice something wrong with that statement? When was the last time anyone was able to keep anything that was released on the internet to go away completely? Don’t you think that Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan, etc. or some even wealthier person would’ve been able to accomplish that by now if it was possible? Unless Sony has some magical internet kill switch that I’m unaware of, I don’t think there is any possibility of doing this.
So why proceed with a futile lawsuit? Rarely do I agree with a parties’ position right off the bat, but in Sony’s case, I’m leaning toward believing Hotz when he says that he’s being sued because he made Sony mad.
From a legal perspective, as far as I can tell Sony’s argument doesn’t have much muster. The U.S. Supreme Court has already established that consumers are allowed to “jailbreak” products purchased from manufacturers. Furthermore, in this case Hotz and the failOverflow team aren’t actually encouraging piracy nor have they released any software that specifically allows for PS3 games to be copied and played illegally. All they’ve done is release the means that potentially allow such circumstances to occur. Nothing illegal there, as far as I can tell.
However, legal arguments aside, the fact of the matter is with the type of information released by Hotz and the failOverflow team, piracy is possible and will likely occur, much in the same way it has for the iPhone, PSP, Nintendo Wii and DS, PC games, music, movies, the list goes on and on. Piracy for the PS3, it would seem is inevitable now, and regardless of what Sony does in court to try and deter people from committing it (which I suspect is the ultimate goal of this lawsuit), will likely do little to stop it.