14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has filed a lawsuit against geohot and several other PS3 hackers responsible for cracking the digital signing mechanism of the PlayStation 3 game console.
At the end of December, during the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin, a group of hackers calling themselves fail0verflow announced a serious flaw in Sony's implementation of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).
The vulnerability allowed the hackers to recover the private encryption key used by the company to sign software and games authorized to run on the PS3 console.
Renowned iPhone and PS3 hacker George Hotz, aka geohot, published the key on his website along with a jailbreak tool that allows the creation of homebrew software.
The complaint was filed on behalf of Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, and names George Hotz, of Cambridge, MA; Hector Martin Cantero of Cantabria, Spain; "Bushing" of San Francisco, CA; Sven Peter of Hungary; and "Segher" of The Netherlands, as defendants.
"On information and belief, Plaintiff SCEA alleges that each Defendant, individually and in concert with the other Defendants has circumvented effective technological protection measures that SCEA employs to protect against unauthorized access to and copying of SCEA's proprietary PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system ("PS3 System"), and other SCEA copyrighted works, and trafficked in circumvention devices and components thereof that enable unauthorized access to and copying of one or more PS3 System and SCEA's other copyrighted works," the complaint [pdf] reads.
Sony has also filed for a temporary restraining order that would force geohot and fail0verflow to stop distributing the private key and tools used to circumvent PS3 security mechanisms.
Meanwhile, the jailbreaking community is hoping the court will arrive at the same conclusion as the U.S. Copyright Office, when it ruled in mid-2010 that jailbreaking iPhones is legal as long as the purpose of such an action is to run independently created applications on the device.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows for exemptions based on fair use principles and jailbreaking supporters strongly believes that once someone buys a device it is within their fair use rights to modify it how they see fit.