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George Hotz, an infamous hardware hacker better known online as Geohot, has a PlayStation that he’s not allowed to play with — at least not the way he likes to, which involves figuring out how to bypass manufacturers’ artificial limits on what users can do with their gadgets.

Geohot settled a civil suit filed against him by Sony for figuring out how to let people play homebrew games on the popular console — in violation of a federal law that prohibits getting around encryption in hardware and software, even if the reason to do it is perfectly legal. He settled the suit last year by agreeing never to tinker again with a Sony product, but his hacker itch has him awaiting a looming decision by federal copyright regulators that, for the first time, could legalize videogame-console jailbreaking.

That, Geohot thinks, might let him “jailbreak” the PlayStation again, freeing it for the world of tinkerers to use as they wish, the same way that a decision in 2010 to allow mobile phone users to liberate their smartphones to run whatever programs they like bolstered a vibrant alternative to the tightly constrained and capriciously run Apple App Store.

“I would really like to get back into that scene,” Hotz said in a recent telephone interview.

Every three years the U.S. Copyright Office entertains requests to create temporary loopholes in the law that makes it unlawful to circumvent encryption technologies in items that you buy. It’s that time again, the fifth go-round since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s 1998 passage. Exemptions, about two dozen granted so far, are allotted if regulators are convinced consumers are “adversely affected in their ability to make non-infringing use due to the prohibition on circumvention.”

It’s part of a long-running showdown between the big copyright holders who view the world as divided starkly into creators and consumers, and a motley coalition of librarians, digital rights groups, disability activists and hackers who seek to preserve a world where people can re-purpose, upgrade and build upon the devices and media they legally buy, just as hackers, painters and culture jammers have done for decades before the DMCA.


The popular mobile phone jailbreaking exemption came against the protests of Apple, which claimed jailbreaking would ruin its business and open the nation’s cell phone networks to “potentially catastrophic” cyberattacks. But copyright regulators decreed that it was finally legal to “jailbreak” smart phones so that iPhone users could install apps that Apple didn’t approve.

Today, there are more than 1 million jailbroken iPhones using a third-party app store called Cydia, and Apple has incorporated into its mobile operating system many of the same tweaks that came out of a freedom it said would doom its business model. Those promised cyberattacks never came and, clearly, Apple’s mobile business is thriving, helping push the company’s stock to stratospheric levels.

The decision also gave legal clearance to Android hackers who busted their way past carrier and manufacturer imposed locks on smartphones so users could install custom flavors of Google’s open-source mobile OS that are devoid of the bloatware and limits carriers put on the handsets.

But under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s still unlawful — a civil or criminal fine — to hack a gaming console or a tablet like the iPad for the same reason.

That might soon change under proposed exemptions offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Hotz, 22, understands this anomaly of the DMCA all too well. Last year, Sony dropped its PlayStation 3 jailbreaking lawsuit against Hotz in exchange for promises that the Palo Alto, California man would never again tinker with the game console or any Sony product. For the moment, he said, he has “put all Sony products in a box.” He said that, since the settlement, he has not “touched them since.”

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Originally Posted by mirkie (Post 381825) Old news. Btw if he comes back, I will chop off my balls myself. He wont come.