Sony looking to expand jailbreak lawsuit to more defendants

@Anticrawl

It's too late stop the hacks, might as well give yourself the strongest case you can in court. It helps to be specific.

@Imikulate

Stupidly enough Sony didn't realize he hadn't gotten that far along in his project and was about to give up. Things wouldn't be as bad as they are if Sony hadn't released that full key to the public via court documents.

@Imikulate

this IS sony we are talking about



from what I understand their lawyer is 18 and fresh out of lawschool, his only other case was some other lawsuit he did for sony and if my memory serves, he lost.

maybe that explains sony's shitty legal choices

@arrrdawg See but thats the strategy here I don't think they really expect to win tho I'm sure they hope to scrape out a victory .....

It sounds a lot like the "we are going to bury you in legal fees." play that companies pull because they can. Since if at any time you stop fighting them they are almost guaranteed a de facto judgment in their favor.

They have enough money that throwing hell a few million into lawyers with the singular purpose of dragging this out for as long as possible is nothing to them, So the CEO will have to cut out using the company jet to fly to Paris for lunch ..... once. While in the other corner your looking at someone who will probably have to mortgage their house just to stay afloat or represent themselves and risk losing because they don't know all the shady operators and existing precedents to site.

Oh yeah and I forgot the part where after they have buried the party of the first part in legal fees from which it will take a good decade to recover from they drop their case last second to avoid setting precedence that they might have to fight against in the future.

So they don't have to win to win.

@Scuffles Maybe that could be. I know the one time I sought legal advice from an employment attorney against a former employer, they told me it wouldn't be worth it even if I won the case because I would be buried in legal fees.

This is a bit different of a case, it has national coverage for one thing and I'm sure his attorneys have made some sort of deal with him. I would expect no matter the outcome, their will be a counter-suit for a settlement to pay for the legal fees/time. It's too early to say anything, but in the coming days/weeks I expect this "restraining order" to be lifted because as mentioned previously the California location, although the US headquarters of SCEA, makes less sense because Geohot is from Jersey and Sony is a Japanese company.

@ouenwoof Yes and all of the mentioned 'hackers' feel the same way. I do not sincerely believe that piracy is their intention. It's just an unfortunate side-effect of opening up the console. It actually makes more sense from a legal stand point to go after the party responsible for making a backup loader and not the exploit which allowed the backup loader to be possible. I don't follow the scene closely but I think that backups currently still require the original disc in the drive in order to boot.

@JCDoe In Soviet Russia, PS3 Hack YOU!!!

@JCDoe
At least two of those guys Sony is looking for don't even live in the US, so doubt they're worried.

@Railgun

Depends on the country and its laws. I think most of the EU has gotten strict on intellectual property rights laws in the efforts to buddy up with the US. Other countries, like China and Russia, don't manufacture significant revenue from IP, so they have little reason to create and enforce IP rights laws.

To those who argue that these hackers do or don't deserve this (argued later in this post), all I can say is this: you obviously don't understand the mindset of hackers. They aren't homebrewers. They don't really care what their hacks are used for. They hack for the sake of hacking. Security systems are their form of "jigsaw puzzles:" they exist for no other purpose than solving.

Do they have it coming then? Shrug, maybe. It isn't like they *maliciously* enabled piracy. But then, they didn't exactly go out of their way to prevent it either.

@Axe99
>more piracy = higher game prices
Really? What was Ocarina of Times retail price when it came out, like 80 dollars? Games nowadays are priced fine, especially compared to what gamers in Europe and such pay for their games. The main driving factor in game prices going up, is development costs, not piracy.

Either way, it doesn't matter, because it's not like Sony is going to win their suit.

@Railgun I never said game prices now weren't fine, and I'm well aware of the much lower real cost of games now than in 1996 (although I doubt it was 80 dollars then - I was a PC and Playstation gamer at the time, but unless Ninty were charging above everyone else in general, that would have been a pretty extensive game for 1998 on either ).

You're also right that the higher costs of development mean higher prices.

However, the devs meet those dev costs through game sales. Less game sales (and piracy hurts game sales - anyone who suggests otherwise is just plain dumb - On top of the research, I know personally of numerous occasions when piracy has hurt game sales), means that games have to cost higher, all else being equal, to meet dev costs. It's all money, and pirates mean less money in gaming, which means less money for everyone in gaming, either the devs or publishers (lower profits and salaries) or gamers (higher game prices, so less money left over for other things).

Pirates cost gamers money - it's not rocket science, and its well established (and has been for decades).

@Axe99 Disagreed. You, like many others posting here, are brainwashed by a capitalistic corporation hell-bent on taking your well-earned money and in return providing something you think is 'worth it'. Hackers are amazing in that they discover exploits in ways normal people would never even know how to look for. That is what is truly amazing. For anybody to truly defend a big capitalistic business especially like Sony, this truly states your stance - that you are definitely a fanboy. Piracy is not the problem - piracy has ALWAYS been there. From the early days of PCs when piracy was as easy as copying a disc to the glory days of arcades when it was just a matter of copying rom chips - it has always been there. Game companies use it as a crutch right now to control everything and justify the prices of games. In truth, they are pulling the wool over your eyes and convincing people that for example piracy was the reason the PSP died. Bullcrap. That's not the reason. Pirates would NEVER buy the games that they pirate. Think about it. Most people at one time or another have been guilty of piracy. And they most likely did it for something they never intended to buy. The majority of piracy occurs in countries that simply can't afford the games they are pirating. Even when piracy does occur on the home front, it often encourages non-pirates to buy the games they play if they enjoy it at a pirate's house. Gameloft for example follows the shareware model of old, if you enjoy the game thus far for free pay for the rest. Anybody who disagrees most likely has an IP address that traces back to SCEA. Seriously, we can prove it arseholes so don't bother.

@arrrdawg Mate, you're living in a dreamworld. Where do I start....

- I'm not defending Sony - I'm defending gaming. I'm defending Tim Shafer and Double Fine's work, I'm defending Jonathon Blow, I'm defending every dev who's ever had the product that most of their crew worked 60+ hour weeks on for months stolen from them.

- Many pirates would buy the games they pirate. While you're right, in that PC piracy has been around forever, there's a wonderful parallel in the music industry. Mysteriously, once music piracy became easy and simple online, music sales dropped through the floor (and concert tickets went up to compensate). Ie, piracy hurts sales - it's clear as bloody day. Hell, it's a big reason why devs moved to consoles in the first place (the devs have said this - the torrent numbers support this, as do the difference in game sales on console vs PC for numerous titles). At the end of the day, if you give a self-centred person who doesn't care about others the option of taking something for free, or paying someone for the work they put into it, they take it for free. That's the choice pirates are given and that's the choice many pirates make. Hell, I know around 50-odd gamers well, and I know that of those who pirate, a significant proportion would buy if they had to. You're living in la-la land if you think pirates wouldn't pay for pirated games. You also clearly know very little about the gaming industry, its history, or IP piracy, or human behaviour.

- Don't forget the vast majority of games have demos. Pirates don't have to pirate, they can play the demos to see if they like a game.

- Piracy has absolutely been there since the early days of PC gaming (I know, I was there) - and so were anti-piracy measures, right from the start. I'm sure that it was just an intellectual activity to keep the devs from getting bored though - I'm sure they made us type in the first word at line two, paragraph three on page 71 of the manual because it'd get us in the mood to game. lol. The reason piracy is a bigger issue now than it was then is because of ready access to the internet and download speeds and quotas big enough to copy whole Blu-ray games if people want. As internet access and torrent sites have made it easier and easier for PC games to be pirated, more and more PC devs have jumped ship to consoles with far lower piracy rates. They've even explained how and why this is happened, in quite some detail. These devs were having literally hundreds of thousands of more people playing their game than were paying for it. Strangely enough, on console people still paid for these games, even though clearly the pirates on PC would never have considered paying for them....

I have no trouble with Hackers that don't help piracy - they're just having a bit of fun with their tech, get into it I say. But openly supporting pirates like your post is basically spitting on the work of every dev, publisher and legit gamer. You're either dumb (and your post does suggest pretty limited knowledge of the way things work, so I'm putting you in this category) or you're a self-centred, thoughtless git who is doing his bit to destroy the gaming industry.

@DigitalFortress Wow you're brutally honest. Do you work for Sony? If not you should apply for a job there. Fanboy