Sony probably has the upper hand legally here. The DMCA seems to be pretty explicit about these kind of this, at least from my non-lawyerly reading of it. Even so, this is quite unprecedented. Apple and Nintendo have both had devices hacked, often by these same people (there's at least two iPhone Dev-Team members there, four members of Team Twiizers, and, of course, geohot), but they never took any kind of legal action.
(Somewhat unrelated, but funny: even Nintendo found out "bushing"'s real name and phone number. I wonder why Sony didn't go through that trouble and referred to him pseudonymously.)
> Sony probably has the upper hand legally here. The DMCA seems to be pretty explicit about these kind of this, at least from my non-lawyerly reading of it.
IANAL, but there are a few things that Sony has going against them: 1) The DMCA interoperability exemptions may apply to this work, although obviously not the piracy side of things (although these guys have not produced anything that is for the sole purpose of copying content), and 2) They are conflating these attacks purely with piracy, which will make their case look far worse when a judge looks at it. Whether or not these things actually matter in the end is up in the air, but this is by no means a cut and dry case. I'm personally excited to see this come to pass, for the precedent this could set, and I hope for the best for bushing et al.
Edit: This is the type of tweet that can lose a case... "The FAIL0VERFLOW Defendants intentionally circumvented SCEA’s TPMs, accessed the PS3 System and trafficked in Circumvention Devices and SCEA’s proprietary information,
with full knowledge that their unlawful conduct would irreparably harm SCEA. Indeed, five days prior to appearing at the Chaos Conference, Bushing echoed a fellow hacker’s comment anticipating this irreparable harm: “Last chance to sell any Sony stock you may have.”"
In this case decided in 2005, Sony received over $6 million in a copyright infringement judgment against a small online retailer who violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201 et seq., by selling computer chips that allowed unauthorized copies of PlayStation games to be played on the PlayStation console.
There was never much of a PlayStation One homebrew or Linux scene though, was there? So it'd be hard to argue that the PS1 device had any useful purpose other than piracy.
Unlike with PS2&3, where for a while there Sony pretty much endorsed alternative uses of the console.
Also, there was the official Net Yaroze system - which had similar restrictions to ps3 Linux - no cd data, and no good access to the GPU: http://jum.pdroms.de/PSX/psxdevstart.html
Sony probably has the upper hand legally here. The DMCA seems to be pretty explicit about these kind of this, at least from my non-lawyerly reading of it. Even so, this is quite unprecedented. Apple and Nintendo have both had devices hacked, often by these same people (there's at least two iPhone Dev-Team members there, four members of Team Twiizers, and, of course, geohot), but they never took any kind of legal action.
(Somewhat unrelated, but funny: even Nintendo found out "bushing"'s real name and phone number. I wonder why Sony didn't go through that trouble and referred to him pseudonymously.)