Also George Hotz fought and cowed Sony’s legal team when he was a kid in a saga involving ‘marcan42 of Asahi Linux. These patent trolls must be very foolish to try to intimidate him.
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_...
“In 2016, he ported Linux to the PlayStation 4 and demonstrated that at the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress by running Steam inside Linux.”
Considering that Sony’s primary claims were:
Violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 1201)
Violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(c))
Contributory copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 501)
Violating California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (§ 502)
I’d say that the outcome failed to reflect Sony’s perspective on the situation and much more closely aligns with “George Hotz faced nearly no actual consequences”.
"Conspiracy to Circumvent Technological Measures and to Traffic in Circumvention Devices", and "Trafficking in Circumvention Devices" were two charges
He was, in fact, selling circumvention devices for the explicit purpose of enabling piracy.
According to Ars Technica the DOJ indictment stated:
* There was a screenshot of the SX OS menu with commercial games in it.
* A public changelog for SX OS publicly trumpeted the feature of "launching your Retro Game ROMs for emulators directly from gDrive,"
* They were "attempt[ing] to cloak its illegal activity with a purported desire to support homebrew enthusiasts who wanted to design their own games."
* the product description for the team's SX devices notes that you can "play all your favorite game backups straight off of the microSD card (or external USB storage!)"
So, yeah, I agree they were selling circumvention devices with at least some level of piracy intent (and that was used to send him to prison after all.) But I think you can also agree the delta between what they were doing and what geohotz did with the PS3 is not very large.
It was absolutely massive. geohots jailbreak did not enable piracy.
It’s like the delta between selling kratom and heroin is not very large, both are drugs that will get you high.
That hack almost certainly had nothing to do with the jailbreaking scene. Sony pulled down their infrastructure to investigate an extensive compromise.