Defendant Hotz, against whom this motion initially is being brought, has established considerable contacts with the District in connection with his unlawful conduct. Upon information and belief, Defendant George Hotz is bound by the “Playstation Network Terms of Service and User Agreement” (the “PSN User Agreement”), ¶14 of which states in relevant part that “both parties submit to personal jurisdiction in California and further agree that any dispute arising from or relating to this Agreement shall be brought in a court within San Mateo County, California.” Further, upon information and believe, in connection with his unlawful conduct, Hotz has utilized an account via PayPal, a company located in San Jose, California, and therefore derives a financial benefit through his unlawful conduct in this district. Bricker Decl. at ¶31, Exh. DD. Mr. Hotz is also unlawfully demonstrating and distributing a circumvention device or component thereof through YouTube, a widely used and interactive website located in Mountain View, California. Id. ¶25, Exh. W. Mr. Hotz has also discussed his unlawful conduct through Twitter, a widely used and interactive website-- the Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order, p. 1
located in San Francisco, California.
(c) On information and belief, Cantero is a member of FAIL0VERFLOW, a group of hackers who have conspired and continue to conspire to engage in unlawful circumvention of the TPMs in the PS3 System. On information and belief, Cantero has used software updates delivered by SCEA for his PS3 system. Additionally, Cantero has used and continues to use github.com, an interactive online software sharing community based in San Francisco, California, to post and distribute throughout the Internet, including to persons in this district, the code and software tools derived from FAIL0VERFLOW's circumvention of the TPMs in the PS3 System. On information and belief, Cantero has committed and continues to commit unlawful acts directed to SCEA in California, knowing that the brunt of the harm resulting from this conduct will be suffered by SCEA in California. On information and belief, individually or as a member of FAIL0VERFLOW, Cantero also has conspired and continues to conspire with Hotz on circumvention activities involving, among other things, the PS3 System.And then they say:
16. Venue is proper in this judicial district under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1391(b) and (c) because a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claims occurred here, a substantial part of the subject property is located here, the Defendants' conduct has been directed into this district, and harm to SCEA has occurred in this district.posted by Monday, stony Monday at 12:19 AM on January 12, 2011
I'm just glad my decision following the Sony rootkit exposure back in 2005 to never, ever buy a Sony product again keeps getting validated.Yeah, it's like how can you boycott a company that you're already boycotting like three times over.
It's actually going to be an interesting argument regarding who stole from who, given that Sony sold a feature and then remotely took it back.The fact that you can write something down doesn't actually make it legally binding. You cannot, for example, just change a contract without giving someone the opportunity to opt out.
...
Eh, they probably have this covered six ways from Sunday in the fine print already.
Sony's main argument is that fail0verflow violated this part of the US copyright laws. To wit: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."Doesn't that require you to actually pirate a game, though? They did not by bypass any copyright controls at all, they simply created tools that could, with a lot more work, form the core of some system to do so later on. The DMCA, I think would apply here:
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—That's what they used to try to stop DeCSS, where a judge ruled that software code could considered a "device". But the problem is this:
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
(3) As used in this subsection—So two important points here: 1) they didn't do anything with actual piracy of games, so there was no actual copyright infringement going on. They subverted the system, but not to "gain access to the work". Also, interestingly they got a signing key not an encrypting, copyright protection key. So I wonder how that would play out in court.
(A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
(f) Reverse Engineering.—And it does seem like the code was developed that way. There is no imediate way to pirate games at all with the tools that were released. You can run your own code, but there aren't any piracy tools. However, people certainly could build those tools around the code.(1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
...
(3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
(4) For purposes of this subsection, the term “interoperability” means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.
Is this morally right? Probably not. But publicly traded companies _literally must do something_ when their core business is compromised like this. If they don't make _commercial best efforts_ in response to a problem, they can lose shareholder confidence or open themselves up to lawsuits and the like. Large companies are always open to large lawsuits, and it is usually better to be on offense. Hence, this suit.First of all, although people often say that corporations are legally required to make as much money as possible for their shareholders, I've actually heard that this is not true. And secondly shareholder lawsuits almost always lose.
No. The decryption key lets you get at lots of other stuff that is still copyrighted, such as the various boot loaders and the like. It's all copyrighted software.It's not a decryption key, it's a signing key. The bootloaders are decrypted, otherwise they wouldn't work. What this will allow is new bootloaders to be signed and loaded into the system.
Whenever I hear people talking about compromising bootloaders on a game system so they can run stuff other than pirated games, I think about head shops that have signs that say "for tobacco use only" next to their case of bongs.I don't think fail0verlow had any interest in pirating games or running Linux. Rather they were mainly interested in social status and being known as really good hardware hackers.
And signing and installing a new bootloader likely infringes copyright by creating a derivative work.I'm not really sure why that needs to be the case. The bootloader is just like the BIOS on a PC, except even simpler. Just like Compaq's BIOS didn't infringe on IBM's, there's no reason a new bootloader would need to use Sony's old code.
CPB: Taken the logic to an extreme, Sony seems to saying that any mere discussion of defeating encryption is infringement. That abstract knowledge is dangerous all by itself. Which is ludicrous, of course.Ludicrous perhaps, but that doesn't keep it from being used to sue people. For example, remember the previously-noted copy protection scheme which relied on your not having disabled Windows Autorun (say, by holding down the shift key when putting the CD in): the manufacturer of that laughable scheme, SunComm, threatened to sue the student who pointed this out, although they did later back down.
This appears similar to challenge lobbies online (private matches where players can access a menu to unlock everything in the game), except it’s being used in public matches and accounts are being tampered with by other players.99.9% chance some folks have just unlocked some features of challenge matches for use public games. A real PITA if you want to play the game, but not a real risk beyond having to play with effing cheaters. And the aforementioned leveling up other people's profiles, but that's a game thing, not a PSN thing, so it only affects specific games that were programmed by morons.
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posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:27 PM on January 11, 2011