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Legal Setback For Sony In PS3 Jailbreak Case: Subpoenas Denied

Posted by: , 14:15 AEDT, Fri February 11, 2011

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Sony will not be able to get details of people who simply watched the PS3 hacking video on YouTube, or just tweeted about it, new court documents revealed.

Sony's attempt to get YouTube, Twitter and other companies to hand over information on the members of security research group fail0verflow and PS3 hacker George Hotz has been denied.

According to court documents first reported by a poster on the PSX-Scene forum, Judge Susan Illston has denied Sony's request to send out subpoenas to flush out more information regarding the crew of fail0verflow, George Hotz (aka geohot), and any other persons or organisations working on hacking the PS3 security system.

The subpoenas were extremely controversial in that Sony had requested information on anyone even remotely related to the case in question, including people who simply re-tweeted the news of the hack or watched the hacking video on YouTube (the same video that this website also linked to). Sony's intent is to expand the case to include more invididuals related to the PS3 jailbreak. So it is no surprise that the judge has denied them, although confirmation of the denial or even if the posted court documents are real, is still missing at the moment. 

A temporary restraining order was granted against George Hotz last month, a hearing on this matter to take place Thursday to determine the scope of the TRO, and whether Hotz's computer could be examined by Sony. Hotz claims that his work was never intended to allow piracy on the PS3, only to allow homebrew. "I made a specific effort while I was working on this to try to enable homebrew without enabling things I do not support, like piracy," stated Hotz.

The next hearing on this matter will be held on March 11, 2011.

Do you think Sony has gone too far in seeking information on *anyone* associated with the PS3 hack? Discuss this news story in our comments section, or in this forum thread:

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=94545


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