No it is not legal to publish that information if it can lead to potential hacking and piracy. Which is what Sony has to prove to win this case. If he posted this and all it did was bring other OS back with no piracy to following, he would be fine. But this is not the case.

But he cannot be held responsible for what others have done, or perhaps that is the underlying debate here. If i sold a gun to someone through the established, legal processes of firearms sales and that someone hauls off and kills someone, i'm not responsible. If he himself has pirated, all well and good to throw the book at him, if he has enabled piracy directly through distribution of copyrighted materials, yes, but he has not

I think to a degree both cases are wrong, but to me the funniest part is always going to be, those users that think this is right, but think what LG is doing is wrong (I think one user went overboard on one of these sites and even said something about NK starting war with SK, so LG would be crushed). Kind of sad they think the law is one sided, that should favour sony. 

Its legal to hack your PS3 because your consumers rights override your liability in regards to the DMCA. You can do what you want with what you own. Its a major distinction from distributing the hack. Hope you understand it better now. Just to let you know, I would greatly disagree if sony start sueing people who downloaded the tools and hack their own PS3 with it. Having in mind they didnt played pirated software that is.

Actually, piracy or not, its a breach of the DMCA to distribute this kind of information. But surely, Sony wouldnt sue if it wouldnt cause them prejudice. I think thats what you meant.

Consumer rights exist to protect the consumer from being cheated by a company. Sony is not cheating you with the playstation. You do not have the right to do whatever you want with a product/with ANY product or service that comes with a ToS/ToA CONTRACTUAL agreement, UNLESS that ToS/ToA has been deemed to violate consumer protection.

In this case, Sony's ToS does not. There is no practice in place to take advantage of the consumer. UNLIKE the cell phone ruling previously, cell phone contracts were deemed to violate consumer protection because rates were higher and customers were locked in what amounted to a monopoly.

Now, this isn't saying that anything you do outside the product's intended use is unlawful. I mean, it IS technically, but as long as you keep it to yourself, nobody is going to be coming around checking out your products, and if you're ever arrested for something unrelated, they're not going to confiscate your stuff. The difference here is that he DISTRIBUTED the means for the world to easily crack the product.

This would be like if I bought one of those unlockable processors, and then hacked it to deliver the fully upgraded performance. That is illegal, but nobody is going to find out. However, if during my hack, I discovered a simple keygen or file or button sequence that could unlock it, and I distributed that hack throughout the internet. THEN, I'd be in real trouble.

PS: I don't know how much you know about internet file distribution and illegal file sharing, but people who download files are almost never prosecuted. They ARE, however, responsible if they UPLOAD the files. Which is why those file sharing programs got people in so much trouble because the software automatically uploads your downloaded files.

Your metaphor is slightly skewed. Selling guns is legal and regulated. Publishing a crack is a grey area, and not regulated. A more apt analogy would be to be selling silencers for guns.

Selling someone a silencer is illegal, because of the intent of the use. There are already laws governing these kinds of justifications, so please understand that this is nothing new. You can't sell drugs because of intent, you can't sell silencers because of intent, you can't do a LOT of things because the intended use or potential use is against either the law, or some group/person/contract.

That could be where removing Other OS comes back to haunt them, then, because doubtlessly the terms of service reserved Sony's right to do so. They have been acting like users don't own the product, which would then void their ability to tout their ToS with impunity. The whole circumvention of DRM thing is a grey area anyway under the DMCA, and in this case they would have to prove substantially that Hotz intended this to be released for the purposes of piracy

And i know distribution of copyrighted files is what's illegal. The fun part is that, as SSJ12 pointed out, script and keygens and such cannot be copyrighted, merely patented, and there's nothing wrong at all about distributing the details of a patented item

1Answered in a post above
2 If the people doing the suing were the keygen maker, then I'd agree that you were right. However, if the people doing the suing was Intel, and it was against the person or people that created the keygen, then I'd say you're wrong. Law would agree with me, which is why keygens and torrents and things of that nature are often hosted on international servers in one of the scandinavian countries (I think it's Sweden).

Also, Sony was sued for removing other OS. If I remember correctly, everyone here was so happy about that. Now on the other side of the same coin, everyone is upset. That looks bad on our community. I agree that Sony breached consumer rights by removing Other OS, but their rights are also being breached now.

Breach of rights is up for the courts to decide, but the original point of all of this was that they are really screwing themselves by getting that judge to release all that private information. That judge screwed up bigtime, and they are going to get nailed on appeal of that evidence has any impact on the case (or not).