Sony just may have pushed its luck in its balls-out legal campaign to take down the PS3 hacking community, as a judge has denied a motion that would have allowed Sony to force Google, PayPal, Twitter and others to testify in the case.

Apparently, after the company's victory in a case against high-profile PS3 hacker George Hotz, Sony thought it could really amp up its attacks. It wanted to go after anyone who had watched a PS3 hacking how-to video on YouTube, bought products online that would enable PS3 hacking, or even spread gossip over the Internet about the subject.

Sony wanted a mass subpoena of some of the Web's biggest sites so it could go after such hooligans. Luckily, the Honorable Susan Illston put Sony in its place, denying the company any right to access information from users on YouTube, Google, Twitter, or Amazon.

The Hotz case received a landmark ruling when the defendant was ordered to surrender all of his computer equipment and remove every post he ever made about how to crack into the PS3's security features.

The ruling has raised a lot of controversy and some are demanding new, clearer laws as to what actually qualifies as illegal hacking. Hotz claimed that he never intended for anyone to run pirated software on the PS3 and was merely hacking the system for fair use purposes.

[Source: PSX Scene]

Feb 10, 2011

av