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EFF on Sony v. Hotz January 24, 2011 The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent statement that the legal action Sony has taken against George Hotz sends a dangerous message. The groups says that it has been warning of the dangers of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act including having a chilling effect on free speech and stifling research on security issues. The EFF says that legitimate security researchers will be afraid to publish results for fear of facing legal action from big corporations. They also added that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be abused to try to make alleged contract violations into crimes. Here is more from the EFF statement: These two things are precisely what's happening in Sony v. Hotz. If you have missed this one, Sony has sued several security researchers for publishing information about security holes in Sony’s PlayStation 3. At first glance, it's hard to see why Sony is bothering — after all, the research was presented three weeks ago at the Chaos Communication Congress and promptly circulated around the world. The security flaws discovered by the researchers allow users to run Linux on their machines again — something Sony used to support but recently started trying to prevent. Paying lawyers to try to put the cat back in the bag is just throwing good money after bad. And even if they won — we'll save the legal analysis for another post — the defendants seem unlikely to be able to pay significant damages. So what's the point? The real point, it appears, is to send a message to security researchers around the world: publish the details of our security flaws and we'll come after you with both barrels blazing. For example, Sony has asked the court to immediately impound all "circumvention devices" — which it defines to include not only the defendants' computers, but also all "instructions," i.e., their research and findings. Given that the research results Sony presumably cares about are available online, granting the order would mean that everyone except the researchers themselves would have access to their work. The group goes on to say that Sony is trying to say that it "has rights in the computer it sells you even after you buy it, and therefore can decide whether your tinkering with that computer is legal or not." They strongly disagree with this. Of course Sony would argue that its console is not a computer at all, but does it matter? You can decide after you read the whole EFF statement here.

"The group goes on to say that Sony is trying to say that it "has rights in the computer it sells you even after you buy it, and therefore can decide whether your tinkering with that computer is legal or not." They strongly disagree with this."

That is what worries me about this. Once it starts where will it end. If I don't really own my electronics what else do i not really own?

You don't own anything. Sony owns you :)

Haha. lol. not just yet haven't gotten my ps3 yet not enough gaming time for a third machine. Although they got their foot in my door with the psp.

edit: didn't mean to post an unfinished post 

but i will say this is bad because revealing any sercuity flaws on the internet when 99% of the time it would be used for bad not good like this guy is wanting with the linux.

So i am on sony side on this

What do you mean? What bank equiptemnt do you own and use? They did not hack into the psn network. They only used their ps3 to get what they needed. Can you tell me how these relate?

i didn't mean to post that i did write it but couldn't finish so i will edit that 

That isn't even remotely close to being the same thing.

You may want to rethink that. You are risking future ownership of actual real world items to just licening the use of said items. I wouldn't want to live in a world were even AFTER I BUY SOMETHING I still do not own it or control it.

Well, there are some distinctions.  I don't know where that is on consoles, but when you buy a game, you're buying a license.  You may own that disc, but you don't own the content on the disc and the license you bought only allows you to do specific things with the content on that disc.

It's like with my condo.  I own the property the condo is on, the space between my walls, but I do not own the walls and the space outside the walls.  There's a very specific set of things I can do to my condo even though I own the property.

With consoles, I'm not sure what you own.  Definately calling it a console instead of a computer is something Sony wants to do but I still don't think they can stop you from reading information on the console and they definately can't stop you from talking about what you found on your console (PS3's do not come with any sort of NDA and I don't think they ever could).

About the only thing they could have grounds what-so-ever would be intent (and even that would be a hard sell and probably wouldn't get anywhere).

-edit-

And I agree with the EFF on this one, what Sony is trying to do is scary and not right.  They have every right to be angry, but they can't really take that out on GeoHot.  This wasn't some clever security hole exploited, this was a gaping hole in their security that they completely missed.