[GregoryRasputin]

It was only yesterday that we reported here, that Sony was taking GeoHot and the members of fail0verflow to court, whilst it seemed some of us thought the filings were questionable, these news court papers from PSX Scene, shows in fact this is a legit case, a lot of it seems to be similar to the files that were used in the Sony Vs PS Jailbreak Case, with screen shots of various forums and websites, the most informative article being #4 PDF, which you will find in the court pack below, this file has mentioned other prominent names from the PS3 Scene.



SOURCE PSX Scene
Download

I wish GeoHot, fail0verflow and any other people being persecuted by Sony, all the best of luck, during these court proceedings.

[calnorak]

im not surprised its legit, but still I hope these guys either are found innocent or dont get any time with bubba

[brandvegn]

I don't really think Sony has a case. No precedence.

[mooshimuushi]

Wow. I hope f0f and geohot the best of luck!

[the_imperfectionest]

This is not trying to start a troll thread here.

That being said, what I do not understand is how everything they point to on their documents say "pirating", enabling such etc. This is mentioned time and time over. Even in the jb update patch, Geohot states that he does not want this to enable piracy, so I don't understand Sony's case.


-Just my thoughts

[hackster]

Probably putting more effort into this post than it's worth, but here it goes.

The dockets filled by Sony's legal team read like they threw together very quickly with no real effort put into their arguments. I say this because a lot of it is worded very unprofessionally in a legal sense.

For some reason, I think some Sony execs had a few Sony Engineers, or a person with a non technical writing/Law/English background submit a statement to their legal team. No respecting lawyer would ever cite websites/forums/twitter accounts or some of the other digital references they included. (pretty ballsy on their part)

I suspect Sony was hoping George Hotz was just going to ignore the court summons, or not hire the proper lawyers to defend himself. Sony had the nerve to literally submit a pre written "proposed order" where the judge simply had to fill in the basic information and dates then sign it!

Should they fail with their current legal action, and decide not to re issue their court case filings in New Jersey (Where Mr. Hotz resides, and that court has the jurisdiction); I think their backup plan was simply to scare Mr. Hotz, FAILOVERFLOW or any one else from developing actual new PS3 exploits and hacks for the future.

No disrespect to anyone who is a developer in the scene, but Hotz, and the FAILOVERFLOW team are prodigies, and have a technical knowledge that far exceeds probably more than 99% of the people in their field.

As a result, if Sony is able to scare them off from future research into exploiting the PS3, I'm sure it will definitely slow down everything currently going on in the PS3 hacking scene. (Though I've been astonished at how well home brew developers have actually produced useful homebrew and other related applications with the exploit data/tools Geohot and FAILOVERVIEW supplied. So maybe future exploits can be done without their help)

Everyone is hatting on everyone, but from a neutral standpoint, I think Sony would have been foolish had they not tried this tactic.. But I have faith in the legal system that they will not succeed in trying to legally bully some 21 year old kid.

What will likely materialize from this whole ordeal is having Geohot or FAILOVERVIEW, etc... release future PS3 exploit anonymously.

Fortunately Hotz seems to have good legal counsel defending him, as the guy basically wrote their response in a relatively non technical manor should the judge not be technology savy or aware of the PS3 "hacking scene".

Good on them!

[pimpspter]

Are you a lawyer hacker? I've been eagerly awaiting a reply here from someone with a legal background to see what they think of things.

As specifically regards citing websites and forum postings as evidence this is normal behaviour for Sony on these issues- take a look at all the leaked court papers from sony's many pspjailbreak psgroove and psfreedom court cases and you'll see they've done that with each and every one of them.... Also most of those cases were successful I believe (to my utter astonishment). Spain told them what I expected mind you.

Also remember that most of those home-brews that were released were existing home-brews for use with jailbreak dongles and as such just needed signed with the new tools!

[Carty]

What I find interesting here is that Sony are only doing this after their security has been successfully compromised. If the activities they describe actually are illegal, why didn't they do anything earlier?

Folks have been trying to crack the PS3 for a long time now. No cease and desist letters there, IIRC. Sony only seem to act when the horse has long bolted.

Perpetrating a crime is illegal, as is trying to perpetrate it. The only reason you wouldn't go after people until they actively succeed is if its not a crime at all, but an exercise in PR.

[edit]

Also what would be interesting would be for a security expert to testify as an independant witness, to give an overview on Sony's failliure to manage the key policies correctly which is the actual root cause of the key exposure.

[calnorak]

i looked through the pdf and am really interested in the exhibits filed under seal

also i agree with hackster- but its sony, they are doing what they do to protect their own

and unfortunately for me i know as much about legal stuff as i do about hacking so looks like the penguin will take a little bit longer then they planned

[Panos99]

Look in the file "04.pdf", page 1, line 12 "December 29, 2011". How can they make such mistakes, in such a serious case?

Also:

Page 1, Line 27 "Graf_cocolo"