Sony Corp.’s legal team must be a busy bunch at the moment. On the one hand they’re battling LG Electronics Co. Ltd. in a Blu-Ray patent dispute that has seen European Union Playstation imports impounded in Holland, and on the other hand they’re fighting an increasingly vitriolic battle against renowned hacker George “GeoHot” Hotz, who is in hot water for cracking open the security on the companies popular console.
GeoHot discovered the Playstation 3’s “root key” – basically a long hexadecimal number that is hard-coded into all of the consoles, meaning it cannot be fixed with just a simple patch. Sony immediately lawyered up and has been attacking Hotz from all angles ever since the root key was made public.
Sony requested they be given access to Hotz’s PayPal account, to see who has donated to his hacking efforts and legal defence fund, and astonishingly the judge allowed it. Pending a possible appeal, Sony will be given access to Hotz’s PayPal transactions for the past two years, all for a hack that was discovered and performed not three months ago. This raises many ugly questions – how will Sony be able to differentiate between, for example, someone who donated to GeoHot’s defence fund, and someone paying for an item sold on eBay? Will Sony be tracking down people they suspect of also using Hotz’s hack on their own Playstations using the data they obtain?
This shockingly short-sighted ruling comes just a few weeks after Sony was also controversially granted access to the IP addresses of everybody who visited GeoHot’s site, as well as various information from Google Inc. and Twitter, in an attempt to track down everybody who has viewed, contributed to, or attempted to carry out GeoHot’s hack.
Sony’s totalitarian approach to containing this hack is rather worrying, as is the actions of the judge presiding over the case, one Joseph Spero.
