PlayStation 3 Hacker Must Allow Sony to Inspect His Hard Drive

The main problem with "forgetting" the passphrase is that they're unlikely to believe you and the judge may rule that the jury is allowed to hold it against you. You're absolutely right about that.

That said, there's a more subtle problem with DRMed media: it's entirely possible to have large, random files on your computer that are, in fact, movies and such that you no longer have the rights to play. If you can't prove that the expired movies are just that, rather than encrypted files of your own, you might get in trouble.

Hopefully, they'd notice that you had an account with whatever service and the movies in question were expired and they were in such-and-such a directory with the appropriate filenames and whatnot, but you never know. I mean, Sony hid a rootkit on a music CD. You never know what crazy things they'll try to put on your computer.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability

I've boycotted Sony since the rootkit. I guess I might be "nearly nobody" but I have put Sony products back on the shelf several times in the past few years.

I take your point, I have yet to see an organized boycott. Nor would this by itself cause me to have any hesitation about Sony.

Yet, this taken together with some of their many other actions in attempting to control the PS, primarily removing the other OS option, has affected my opinion of Sony and what they are likely to do in the future. I'm not about to take a sledgehammer the PS3 I have now. Yet, when the next generation of consoles comes out, it will weight as one factor about which one I go with.

Yeah, everyone who's disgusted by Sony enough to care will have stopped buying their products a long time ago, probably starting with the rootkit debacle.

"Defendant gave the code to person X. He should get it back." Here, "the code" could reasonably be a USB stick, a printout, or whatnot. If the request didn't make clear it was distributed over the internet, why would the order?

Second, it is not the job of a judge to "understand technology". We may not even want judges that are specifically steeped in technical knowledge. What we need them to be is fair arbiters of the law and of the ways the law allows facts to be introduced into evidence.

To deal with the "expedited discovery" bit, the lawyer himself took custody of their hard drives. As an officer of the court, he could take responsibility for preventing evidence from being destroyed. He then offered to make it available to third-party forensics experts for imaging, and they would be able to get a ruling from a judge concerning exactly which things those experts would be ordered to search for (rather than letting the plaintiff's lawyers trawl through everything at their leisure).

I'm not quite clear on how much of that is happening here. One might hope this would be the ordinary procedure, but I have to worry about any judge who signs an order telling someone to retrieve information from the internet, period. I realize it was swiftly reconsidered and amended.

For that, I give them due credit, even though I worry about any state of affairs wherein an absurd order could be issued in the first place.