Sony, Hotz settle PS3 hacking lawsuit

[wraggster]

Sony Computer Entertainment and George Hotz have settled their hacking legal dispute, according to a joint statement.
Sony had been taking legal action against Hotz for publishing and distributing security circumvention for the PlayStation 3.
Hotz has now consented to a permanent injunction and said that "it was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier. I'm happy to have the litigation behind me." He added that he is not involved in any of the recent attacks on Sony websites and services.
Those attacks are from a loose collective of hackers linked to Anonymous - the settlement between Hotz and Sony was agreed in principle on March 31, days before Anonymous threatened Sony for its legal actions against Hotz and other notorious hackers.
Said Riley Russell, general counsel for SCEA: "Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers. We believe this settlement and the permanent injunction achieve this goal."
Despite a press release focused on cooperation, Hotz has now said he is boycotting all Sony products in the future.
Sony has not revealed any details of its pursuit of hacking group fail0verflow, which it was also taking legal action against at the same time as George Hotz.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...acking-lawsuit

[adventure_of_link]

So... what are the exact conditions for this permanent injunction?

[BlueCrab]

Basically, what's publicly available says that geohot can't "hack" any Sony projects, past, present, or future, essentially (or that's my understanding of it).

However, that's only the permanent injunction part. One would assume that Sony must have made some concessions. The rest of the terms of the settlement are not available to the public and geohot is not allowed to talk about it, apparently.

[adventure_of_link]

Basically, what's publicly available says that geohot can't "hack" any Sony projects, past, present, or future, essentially (or that's my understanding of it).

However, that's only the permanent injunction part. One would assume that Sony must have made some concessions. The rest of the terms of the settlement are not available to the public and geohot is not allowed to talk about it, apparently.

So, it's a case of Sony won and the commoner lost..

DAMN.

[BlueCrab]

So, it's a case of Sony won and the commoner lost..

DAMN.

Yes, and no at the same time. One thing that I also noticed is that after settling with geohot, they subsequently dropped all the other defendants in the case. We'll see what happens, but it almost seems to me that geohot might have settled with the condition that Sony drop the lawsuit against fail0verflow.

If that's the case, things might get more interesting still... Also, note that geohot's motion for dismissal on the grounds of inappropriate jurisdiction still seems to be on the agenda. I'm not a lawyer, but to me it seems that if he succeeds on that ground, this permanent injunction might be vacated as a part of that...