Looks like Sony's lawsuit thuggery isn't going to get too far with wider free speech / digital rights / fair use proponents. Don't be surprised if the EFF takes the case and this goes down just like their rootkit snafu a few years back, but in the meantime it seems academia is making a promising stand.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/GeoHot/
January 11, 2011:
Our friends at Sony are having another bad day: i.e., doing something breathtakingly stupid, presumably because they don't know any better. This time they're suing George Hotz for publishing PS3 jailbreak information, as reported by EnGadget and Attack of the Fan Boy. Hotz's jailbreak allows PS3 owners to run the software of their choice on a machine they have legally purchased. His site is geohot.com. Free speech (and free computing) rights exist only for those determined to exercise them. Trying to suppress those rights in the Internet age is like spitting in the wind. We will help our friends at Sony understand this by mirroring the geohot jailbreak files at Carnegie Mellon.
GeoHot MirrorClick here for usage instructions.Note to Sony lawyers: no doubt you're eager to rack up another billable hour by sending legal threats to me and my university. Before you go down that unhappy road, check out what happened the last time a large corporation tried to stop the mirroring of technical information here: The Gallery of CSS Descramblers. Have you learned anything in ten years? David S. TouretzkyResearch Professor of Computer Science Last modified: Wed Jan 12 09:17:46 EST 2011 |