Sony vs. The World 1:0 …?

13. April, 2011

So Georg Hotz “caved in” and accepted to sign a settlement agreement (good article). Those quotes aren’t accidental; being accused in a law-suit does odd things to your life and most of them are unpleasant. Being famous isn’t as great as MTV wants you to believe. Ever wondered why all those famous persons are either weird, drug addicts or die early? There might be a connection.

As for Georg, one hell is over and now he gets raped by all his supporters. It’ll wash over, trust me.

So did Sony win? No. Win would mean to prove in court that it’s illegal to decrypt and modify the firmware of the PS3. Which they avoided. If you’re a multi-billion dollar company and someone/something is a threat to one of your most valuable products (my impression after reading what SCEA said during the lawsuit), wouldn’t you want to make sure this issue is fixed once and for all? For some reason, Sony didn’t.

It’s probably because they didn’t want to harm poor Georg.

*hilarious laughter*

Oh man, I’m killing myself. So. Sony caved, Georg won: He’s not going to jail, he isn’t fined, he isn’t prosecuted. He’s a free man. Well, mostly.

He isn’t allowed to do illegal things with “any SONY PRODUCT” (their yelling). Oookaaayy… what exactly is illegal? Wasn’t that one important point that the lawsuit should have settled?

I mean in Europe, it’s legal to reverse engineer any software if you need that knowledge to make it cooperate with some other software (“make it interoperable”) and if you can’t get that knowledge some other way (competitor wants to keep you out of the market, producer is no longer around, etc.). You must not spread the reverse engineered code but you could, for example, write a patch or an installer with it.

And Georg isn’t allowed to talk about the settlement which is confidential. I don’t need to understand this, I guess, but I’m sure he would rather forget this sad story and move on.

So. One guy fixed. I’m sure no other smart person on the planet is going to try this again. Ever.

And one prediction: It seems that Georg has some money left. Instead of wasting it on his own case (which Sony might have dragged out for a decade, for example) he might have invested it in the other lawsuit where chances to win might be much higher – especially with all the notes he got from his case.


Sony cracks down on Geohot

7. February, 2011

In an insane attempt to stop the world, Sony has sued George “Geohot” Hotz. Some comments on this:

The court has granted Sony’s request for TRO. In the document, the court rules: “… Hotz shall … preserve, and not destroy, erase, delete, dispose of, or alter any documents or records, … that relate to … the Circumvention Devices, or any communications with any party concerning the manufacture, …” (page 3, 12-22).

Hm … since Geohot distributed that information via his website and the “any party” is the world, doesn’t that mean he must not take the information down? Since taking down the information would mean to alter his homepage which the court ruling strictly forbids …

Or as Dan Gillmor found in his blog post: “Given that the research results Sony presumably cares about are available online, granting the order would mean that everyone except the researchers themselves would have access to their work.”

It’s interesting to see that the people, who turned the justice system into what it is today, starting to strangle themselves into it.

“Beware not to lose the war by winning it”
Haul monk to Forne Rako


At last: Filing patents is been patented!

11. January, 2011

Just before the end of last year, a gaping hole has been closed in the struggle to turn the world in a lawyer’s playground: IBM has filed a patent that patents filing patents.

Whenever you apply for a new patent, you’ll have to pay royalties to IBM! It’s like the invention of the self-printing money! Well done! 🙂

References:


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