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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

> for something that could potentially cost them millions

You can be very sure that if a piracy case went to court, Sony would claim to suffer billions in damages.

In an alternate universe, perhaps the fact that Sony valued this exploit at just 20k would work against them in a piracy case

Not sure on that, the Nintendo v Team Xecuter case ended up with $10 million in damages for selling Switch piracy mods/tools

https://torrentfreak.com/gary-bowser-agrees-to-pay-10-millio...

I despise Team Xecuter for a number of reasons, but these two exploits aren't necessarily comparable. The Playstation vuln in question would allow people to create pirated Blu-Ray disks that work as-expected on vanilla PS5 models. TX created a custom firmware that required hardmodding your Switch to persist. Nintendo couldn't really wring out TX without proving that their damages went beyond just the owners of hacked Switch consoles, which it certainly didn't. In Sony's case, they could probably sue pretty hard if people started selling pirated or counterfeit PS5 games, since every PS5 owner is effected.

IANAL, but I think you have to keep the scope of the damages in consideration.

By every owner affected you mean, there is small to no moat and everyone can use it if they so wish.

It is not like PS5 owners are going to be upset for having a straightforward way to run games -- e.g. make their own Blu-ray copies etc.

Edit: To clarify: that this is valued for/by Sony at only 20k is beyond me. But absolutely that valuation should be admissible in court in my opinion. On the other hand, this number tells me to never submit a bug bounty for the money -- at least to some companies. It is simply not worth most of the time/most of the contexts. Write a paper/publication of some short and use it to get a good job that pays you salaried for more -- if you have already one just publish them immediately with a ping to the sec team. If they want to fix these fine, otherwise... they can pre-pay you to report them to them under contract for a good amount of money.

> allow people to create pirated Blu-Ray disks that work as-expected on vanilla PS5 models.

I don’t understand why there isn’t an industry of selling pirate copies of official games. What I mean is buying an official copy of the game, “image” the disc, and press 1:1 copies for cost + a couple dollars.

Why didn’t that happen? Are there technical issues preventing this from working? I can’t think it’s a matter of cost, BRD can’t cost that much to make at scale.

Not sure how it works exactly (I'm sure someone else in this thread can fill in!), but that hasn't ever been possible on consoles. Not even the very first Playstation which used CDs would accept copies out of the box.

I think PS1 CDs had data written in an area (early?) consumer CDR writers couldn’t reach. I don’t know about PS4/5 games.

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