PS3 Hacker Successfully Gathers Donations for Legal Battle with Sony

It only took several days for PS3 hacker geohot to earn the money required for his legal fees from donations made by members of the gaming community.

Back in January, Sony filed a lawsuit against renowned iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker George "geohot" Hotz, and several others responsible for cracking the digital key used to sign all software that runs on its popular game console.

The hackers were able to recover the key because of a flaw in Sony's own implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), that was revealed in December at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin.

The company managed to obtain a temporary restraining order against geohot, which forced him to remove the ECDSA key and all software related to PS3 jailbreaking from his website.

He was also ordered to hand over all of his computers and storage devices to Sony's lawyers to be searched for PS3 hacking tools.

Sony maintains that jailbreaking the PS3 consists a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), but the gaming community disagrees, saying that people have the right to do whatever they want with the devices they buy.

iPhone jailbreaking faced the same problem until the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that the practice falls under the "fair use" principle and added it to the list of DMCA exemptions.

Geohot explains on his blog that this legal battle with Sony is not only his own, but of the entire community. He also reaffirms his position against copyright infringement.

The hacker opened a legal defense fund and started accepting donations in order to hire the "hardest hitting lawyers in this business."

"I would hate to lose this case due to resource starvation, and with the support of the masses, I won't. Lets turn the bully back on itself. This case has the ability to set a huge precedent for consoles and all closed systems to come. The other two should be begging Sony to back off," he wrote.

And it didn't take long for the community to react. After just a few days, Hotz announced that the first round of donations is closed and he has enough money to cover the legal fees for the time being.