The police force in Johannesburg, South Africa has announced that it has taken down an organization that specialized in jailbreaking PlayStation 3 home gaming console and in distributing games that have been launched on the console.
The local press reported that the Commercial Crime Unit in the city entered the house of one member of the organization and there discovered and seized “various state of the art computers, circumvention software packages, jailbreak USB devices, PS3 consoles and hard drives” and “fake PS2 games, original PS3 games, believed to be used as masters and documentation.”
A suspect has also been arrested and held for investigation in what apparently is the first arrest made in the world of someone who has modified a PlayStation 3 home gaming console in order to eliminate its protections.
The case will be prosecuted in the Specialized Commercial Crimes Court and the South African Federation Against Copyright Theft also launched a parallel complaint against the piracy ring.
It's not clear if this is part of a new trend to reduce video game related piracy in South Africa, a market that has huge potential to grow but is affected by the fact that only a small number of consoles are used to play original material.
Sony has been more heavy handed recently when it comes to protecting its console and battling piracy.
The company has removed the OtherOS feature from its platform, claiming that a number of gamers used it to get access to bits of the console that are off limits.
When a number of hackers breached the copy protections of the
PlayStation 3, citing OtherOS removal as a reason, the company quickly launched lawsuits against them and settled without revealing the conditions.
The late April attacks against the PlayStation Network were executed by groups that objected to how Sony handled that particular situation.
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