14 DAY TRIAL // The legal battle between video games hardware maker Sony and George “Geohot” Hotz, the hacker that was part of a group which penetrated the security systems of the PlayStation 3 home console, has come to an end via an out-of-court settlement and the details of the agreement between the two sides have now come out.
The court documents, which were exposed by Gamespot, says that the court “ordered and adjudged” that the defendant will be “permanently enjoined and restrained from” quite a number of activities that might amount to violating the End User License Agreement and illegally accessing any Sony made product.
The documents go on to mention: “Reverse engineering, decompiling, or disassembling any portion of Sony Product”, “Using any tools to bypass, disable, or circumvent any encryption, security, or authentication mechanism in Sony Product”, “Using any hardware or software to cause the Sony Product to accept or use unauthorized, illegal or pirated software or hardware” and “Exploiting any Sony Product to design, develop, update or distribute unauthorized software or hardware for use with Sony Product.”
There's more legal jargon essentially saying that George Hotz is forbidden from hacking or helping distribute hack methods linked to Sony products.
If he does not abide by the terms of the agreement, the hacker will have to pay 10,000 dollars for each time he violates the deal, with an overall cap set at 250,000 dollars.
The agreement does not prevent Geohot from speaking out against Sony and he recently said that users should consider joining the class action suit that has been launched against the company because of how it has removed the Other OS feature from the PlayStation 3.
Geohot initially said that he did not intend to introduce piracy to the PS3 and he only did the hack to enable homebrew applications.