> Lets just say, I want the settlement terms to include OtherOS on all PS3s and an apology on the PlayStation blog for ever removing it. It'd be good PR for Sony too, lord knows they could use it. I'm also willing to accept a trade, a legit path to homebrew for knowledge of how to stop new firmwares from being decrypted.
This still looks like a win for geohot though. Unless there is something missing from the agreement, a 'permanent injuction' on one person hosting information that has already spread virally is basically worthless to sony.
I'm sure his idealism faded sitting on the wrong side of a table of lawyers, though.
Trials are never a sure thing, especially when the other side has deeper pockets, and especially when the laws at issue are so messed up.
Hotz gets out of this with his fame and bank account intact, his hack is already out there, and Sony's still defending against a class-action lawsuit that has the potential to restore OtherOS functionality for everybody else and force Sony to pay damages. The only limitation on Hotz is that he can't do it again to the same company, but he probably won't need to since he's already got root for his PS3.
This settlement is a cease-fire that neither side will want to violate, and Sony didn't get any of what they wanted. (They didn't even make an example of Hotz to scare off other hackers!) It's definitely a win for Hotz, and it's not a loss for the rest of us.
The RIAA at least demands money (albeit only a few thousand dollars). If the agreement here is as the announcement seems to suggest (injunction only), it'd be as if the RIAA settled for just an injunction directing the person not to pirate their songs in the future, with no exchange of money. Most RIAA suit targets would probably take that settlement offer without complaint, and it wouldn't have much deterrent effect.
They probably showed Hotz just how much he was about to get reamed and he folded. Not commenting on the legality or rightness of either side, just the fact that Sony probably has a lot more money and lot more lawyers dedicated to stuff like this.
If that were the case, why would Sony be willing to drop it? It's not like the case was ever about just Hotz, because Sony knew from the start they would never get any significant damages out of him. It was about publicity and precedent.
In trying to establish personal jurisdiction, Sony got to dig up basically all the dirt on Hotz. Even though they claimed several times to have found a "smoking gun", they never did, and they could tell that they weren't going to in the full discovery process.
Neither side could risk a trial, because it would have been solely about nuanced interpretations of laws that weren't written with modern technology in mind. The outcome of a bench or jury trial would have been essentially random, and a long appeals process would have been necessary to truly settle things.
Settlement is cheaper than litigation. Regardless of the side. Not to mention if Sony can get everything they want out of Hotz without going to trial, why should they go to trial?
That doesn't make sense.
Please stop acting like this is a win for Hotz in any capacity. He got exactly zero of the things he wanted. Well, I guess he got one thing, Sony not breathing down his neck. But all of the conditions he placed on settlement (OtherOS, etc) were not met. But he settled anyway.
You only go to trial when you have nothing to lose. Both parties stood to lose in a trial regardless of the outcome. Sony would have maybe gotten what the settlement netted them minus the cost of the trial. Maybe less, maybe more. Maybe damages Hotz could never pay. They stood to lose in trial even if they won the verdict. Hotz was inconvenienced for a few months and probably can't even think about talking about the PS3 indefinitely. Trial could have essentially cost him his life. Trial costs and damages alone could have placed Hotz in a crippling financial situation.
Considering that the blog post made no mention whatsoever of OtherOS, I would suspect not.
My guess is that the settlement agreement is basically exactly what they said, that he'll stop distributing the code or any future modifications of that code. I'm sure Hotz lawyer came to realize that a protracted battle, even if he would win, would cost far more than Hotz would be able to pay.
The law is not clear. Not on this matter, anyway. There's a lot of legal precedent in favor of Hotz, but not enough to conclusively say that what he did is, strictly speaking, legal or illegal.
The fact of the matter is that because they settled, that question will not be answered. It won't be, until someone stands their ground and forces the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.
Many of the commenters at Ars Technica (which has been following this story closely) have similar opinions of Sony and of Mr. Hotz.
Those praising the actions of Sony don't seem to understand any of the larger issues here. It doesn't matter to them that free inquiry is being destroyed in order to shield the embarrassing secrets of a huge corporation from public view, as long as they can boot up their game console and play their shiny new video game without any inconvenience.
Interesting to see, however, that the side people take is an efficient indicator of their intelligence level - not as in IQ, but as in CIA (on its better days).
The moment I read the comments I was like, "this is so different from the view people have on HN". Also I am sure these are kids who just swear by their consoles. Sadly they are Sony's biggest chunk of consumers.
At first I was taken back by the comments but then I realised that they are the opposing camp. HN readers support Geohot while Playstation.com readers support... Sony. Just 2 sides of the story.
I can motivate my support for geohot, I'd like to hear their reasons (besides all the FUD spread everywhere by sony & friends).
I thought that hackers and playstation 3 "owners" would be on the same side, given that the ultimate question here is whether they really own the console or not.
and, unfortunately, it is also "more fun" to root for the "winning team", so when there are shifts in the balance of power you see shifts in the demographics of agreement. :(
Actually, given the ps3-owning demographic, the widespread impression that geohot was trying to enable piracy may actually have increased support for him. Gamers are a notoriously piratey bunch, so if the story had been "George Hotz wants you to be able to play games from bittorrent", he might have enjoyed wider support.
Most PS3 owners care about playing games, watching DVDs, maybe playing some streaming media, etc. As long as those things work, they'll have no interest in who actually controls the machine. They'll certainly have no interest in hacking the guts of the console to turn it into a flaky general purpose computer. There's a good chance they already have plenty of those around. And since they get no utility from the hacks but do pay some costs, it seems perfectly rational to pick the "wrong" side from your perspective.
Which isn't to say that Sony has handled this well: they're still incompetent and Evil.
Given the choice between paying $X for a console that comes with restrictions so that you can only use it for playing games, or paying $Y for a console that you can do anything you want with, where $Y is greater than $X by up to a couple hundred dollars, most PS3 buyers would take the former.
I can see how people might worry that if using PS3s for non-gaming becomes widespread, Sony might feel the need to raise the price to make up for the loss.
> I thought that hackers and playstation 3 "owners" would be on the same side
Apparently, Anonymous took down the PSN for some time in protest to the litigation. I'm sure that galvanized the viewpoint of some Playstation users who may not have even been aware of the bigger picture.
There's a belief among some gamers that the cracking of a console somehow, magically, enables people to cheat in online games. And driven by that belief and a hate for cheaters, they go after the wrong target.
The belief is mostly correct however, although it is true that the targets are indeed wrong. People doing the initial grunt work of cracking a console are not the same people as the ones developing cheats.
The cheating on PSN, up until now at least, has been entirely through exploits of binary saved game data (which can be transferred to and from the console freely). There was widespread hacking long before any jailbreak.
Don't get me wrong, jailbreaking certainly opens up other avenues, but Sony (and developers) had been doing a very poor job of anti-cheat for a long time. With the jailbreak, they simply found a scapegoat that they hoped would take the heat off of them.
Apparently the great majority of visitors to Sony's PlayStation blog haven't experienced the joy of developing their own firmware and operating system for their home supercomputer appliance.
Poor souls. I always knew video games would destroy the mind and the ability to appreciate the finer things in life.
To a degree, yes. Fanboy-ism creeps up on the best of us. I'd like to think that at least in some places (like HN), the commentators are more educated on the topics they're discussing.
No, I won't back down from that. Those people all sound like they've gleefully sucked down the kool-aid that Sony spoon-fed them. I'll burn a few karma points to stand by my opinion.
I agree with your view, that's not what I was criticising. It was your choice of words. Describing people as "sheep" is a horribly overused phrase and it has associations of angsty teenagers raging against the machine.
It is also not generally a good idea to attack others for following the crowd, as we all do it. Those who consider themselves contrarian are typically simply choosing to highlight the areas where they reject society, while ignoring the myriad ways in which they toe the line every day. People who really do question all of society's assumptions get locked away in mental hospitals.
Also, we all follow what others tell us because it would be impossible not to. To do otherwise would require independently researching and validating each and every position one holds, and there simply isn't enough time in the day.
If you really questioned everything, you would achieve nothing.
What can't believe are the comments on that page. Are people really that eager to praise their "overlords" in the name of "better gaming"? But can there really be that many trolls?
The scary part is that these are most likely real people, who like their control and surveillance just fine, and are the majority. Which means we will probably see a completely locked down internet sooner or later.
They are 14 year old playstation fanboys, who have a religious devotion to their console brand of choice. This stems from the teenage search for identity. Having made violently strong cases for their favoured console in arguments with their friends at school, they are now ideologically wedded to this position and unable to deviate from it one iota for fear of the inconsistency being seen as weakness, and more importantly, of it undermining their own fragile sense of who they are: a Playstation Fan.
It's basically a microcosm of partisan politics. Don't worry too much about it.
EDIT: Alternatively they could be very lazy astroturfers.
EDIT2: The comparison of console wars to partisan politics has raised another question that I've never considered before: what will happen in a few decades time when the children of people who have themselves been gaming since childhood reach their teen years? Will we see similar patterns to politics, where children tend to inherit their views from their parents without question? Will parents war with their children over their opposing views on gaming?
"This family has played nintendo for four generations! I'll be damned if any son of mine is going to play an xbox 1080 under my roof!"
Regarding your second edit, it's not as if brand loyalty is some amazing emergent phenomenon in the 14-year-old-game-console-consumer-ecosystem. People are just as loyal to brands of operating systems, cars, banks, food, pants, cigarettes, useful pocket tools, kitchenware, and high-efficiency toilets, and they've been so forever.
You are right. The difference between consoles and the rest of those product categories is that people do not typically have them as a core part of their identity in the way that children often do with video games, and the way that many people do with political parties. Well, maybe they do for operating systems.
However, while politics remains a defining factor in peoples views of themselves well into adulthood and parenthood, console/OS choice does not.
Those people for whom it does are probably less likely to breed so the effect will likely not be measurable.
Ford and John Deere are two brands that I believe have been integrated into the identity of some. I'm trying to think of other examples, news, maybe beverages? coke&pepsi is now obvious to me, others are harder. I guess apple/google/microsoft is the only other I can find.
Those were my initial thoughts as well, but my next thought was that it could very well be that the general public simply does not care about issues like open information. They are happy as long as they get their games or Facebook access, and when faced with a question about such a matter they will believe the authority on the subject. And reading HN provides false hope.
The general public do not care about console modding rights at all. That's why they do not rush to post comments on sony's corporate blog. The majority of people don't even really know what a blog is. Even if they did, they would likely have no motivation to spurt their comments unbidden onto it. What we do here really is deviant behaviour, statistically speaking.
Normal, non-religiously-devoted gamers don't post there either, they inhabit more independent fora. The only people posting there are sony fanboys.
Note that this does not include the confidential memorandum of understanding (page 1, line 20), which would contain the meat of what was actually agreed to by both parties.
Generally speaking, the law in the US affords one a broad ability to contract. That is to say A and B can make a deal and a court will hold them to it. This property of the law has obvious and immense value. The ability to contract is not absolute and is limited in some ways.
One of the ways that freedom to contract is limited is that contracts should not contravene public policy. In general, legal settlement, as opposed to going all the way through trial, is considered to be a good thing.
The parties reached an agreement they could accept with and the public did not have to use up scare resources of judicial time. Also, the public did not have to force an outcome on one of the parties.
"Sony is glad to put this litigation behind us,” said Riley Russell, General Counsel for SCEA."
likely because they realized they were being dipshits half way through. glad this case is over and i can't believe it wasted so much time. my respect and empathy goes to hotz; i'm sure his past few months were miserable.
Is their case against fail0verflow, who found most of the vulnerabilities geohot actually used to jailbreak it (and re-ported Linux, for example), still on? There's not many details in this post or anywhere else online.
Sony also dismissed the case against the rest of the defendants (f0f members included). It looked like Sony didn't bother to go after any defendant but geohot after they filed the case. However, SCEE is still suing Alexander Egorenkov (graf_chokolo) in Germany to the tune of 1,000,000 Euro.
I wonder what the 'permanent injunction' prevents him from doing?
Having been in similar situations in court facing virtually unlimited legal budgets and opposing counsel focused on PR victories I can understand why geohotz settled, however, the wording of the statement tells me that the permanent injunction agreed to actually doesn't prevent much otherwise it would be more heavily touted.
I have a feeling this statement "a preliminary injunction was issued requiring Hotz to take down the postings challenged by SCEA." reveals that the injunction was to permanently remove the postings. (eg. Hotz won!)
Yeah but at the same time it's not just him that should have to deal with all the trouble that fighting would have caused him. Sometimes you have to pick your fights.
Too bad, because he seemed to be winning and he had enough public support to take the fight as far as he wanted. He could have made an example of Sony. They will likely choose someone more vulnerable for their next victim.
What do you base that on, community support? Some initial faintly favourable legal maneuvers? A specific turn of phrase in a legal book would have decided this in the end. And then been appealed, multiple times.
That assumes he paid Sony something, which isn't necessarily true. Given the way things were going, I personally feel that the impetus to settle came from Sony's side, knowing they had a weak case.
Meh, PS3 is the last console I'll ever buy. I guess for Sony this is a Pyrrhic victory. What they have done is gone out of their way to prove that no, you don't own that box. You bought a box and we can change the contents.
I skimmed it - It's boring. From my reading, George can't hack any more Sony products or talk about hacking Sony products, or direct anyone to talk about hacking Sony products. No money, No promises (though there is some talk about where they promise to sue each other if they do this again). That's it.
19 On March 31,2011, Hotz met with SCEA representatives and the Parties entered
20 a confidential Memorandum of Understanding, agreeing to settle the dispute between
21 them.
There's another document (that won't be revealed unless someone leaks it) that details what was actually agreed to.
Most probably the settlement includes a clause not to talk about the settlement. Also, the second clause of the club^Wsettlement is... well you get the point.
But you donated to a legal defense fund. You may have hoped for a different outcome, but the fund was for the defense of the individual, and in this case settlement was likely the best defense.
But maybe he promised not to settle in soliciting donations, all I see is a blog post saying here is a legal defense fund. And even if he said he would demand certain things, the fact remains that he was defending himself and has to make the right call.
No the fund was not for the defence of an individual. You assume that the defence was for an individual and not a community. (from geohot.com) "Together, we can help fix the system". Hardly sounds self serving does it? The community rallied because it was largely felt that an attack on GH was an attack on all of us. I may have reconsidered my donation if GH had said "Together we can help save my ass"
You could have gone to the courthouse in California and announced yourself as one of the Does who wished to be represented fairly in court if you felt that this court case involved you just as much as it involved him.
In another context, GeoHot saying "Together, we ..." is much like his saying "if you want your console to be secure get in touch with me, any of you 3", and SCEA interpreting that as extorsion. If anything, it goes to prove that GeoHot is not an English major and has difficulty being succinct and direct in writing. Assuming that he actually is going to band the community together to "stick it to the man" is fairly naive. He was the one being sued, and his number one priority was to stay out of jail and not get his paycheck garnished for the next 65 years.
I donated because I've been in those shoes. I donated so he wouldn't get a million dollar settlement. Trust me, when you're in the position settling for something that doesn't involve millions of dollars that you don't have sounds like a good idea. As they say on Wall St. Stay alive to trade another day.
> What if SCEA tries to settle?
> Lets just say, I want the settlement terms to include OtherOS on all PS3s and an apology on the PlayStation blog for ever removing it. It'd be good PR for Sony too, lord knows they could use it. I'm also willing to accept a trade, a legit path to homebrew for knowledge of how to stop new firmwares from being decrypted.
I wonder if any of those terms were met?