Geohot Surprisingly Settles with Sony

In a surprising move, renowned PS3 and iPhone hacker George Hotz agreed to settle the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony on terms that remain unclear.

George Hotz, known online as geohot, was sued by Sony earlier this year after he reverse-engineered and published the private keys used by the company to sign all software running on the PlayStation 3 console.

After Sony obtained a temporary restraining order forcing him to remove all PS3 hacking-related materials from his website and social media accounts, geohot asked for help from the jailbreaking community to fund his legal defense.

At the time the hacker pledged to fight Sony in order to bring back OtherOS, the feature which allowed PS3 owners to run Linux on their consoles, but was later removed by Sony with a firmware update.

"What if SCEA [Sony Computer Entertainment America] tries to settle? Lets just say, I want the settlement terms to include OtherOS on all PS3s and an apology on the PlayStation blog for ever removing it," geohot wrote when he asked for donations.

It's not known if this unexpected settlement contains anything about OtherOS, but so far there was no apology made by Sony.

In fact, Patrick Seybold, Sony's senior director of corporate communications & social media, revealed on the PlayStation blog that Hotz agreed to a permanent injunction.

It's unclear what this injunction entails, a ban on republishing the information already removed from the hacker's website, a ban on hacking the PS3 in the future, a ban on hacking any Sony products or other more broad restrictions.

Geohot did not reveal any details about the settlement either, because he is bound by contract not to discuss it. He did, however, tell users questioning him on his blog that the action was not a waste and that "I am fighting your fight, in the best way I know how."

On the matter of what happened with the donated money, Hotz said that he will address it in a forthcoming post, and thinks people will be happy with the outcome.

Finally, the hacker announced that he is joining a Sony boycott, which involves not purchasing any products from the company in the future. He also encouraged other people to do the same.