14 DAY TRIAL // Sony Computer Entertainment America, through its legal representatives, and George Hotz, best known under his hacker name of Geohot, have announced that they have settled the suit which they were involved in, registered with the federal court in San Francisco, California.
Sony says that the settlement includes consent from Hotz on a permanent injunction, although the company has not detailed exactly what that means.
Initial agreement on the settlement was reached on March 31.
Riley Russell, who is the general counsel working for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, has stated, “Sony is glad to put this litigation behind us. Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers. We believe this settlement and the permanent injunction achieve this goal.”
In the official statement coming from Sony, George Hotz is quoted as saying, “It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier. I’m happy to have the litigation behind me.”
Sony started a legal action against Geohot and other hackers that were accused of breaching the security layer of the PlayStation 3 home gaming console, with the company saying that their aim was to enable piracy on the device.
The hackers stated that they were only interested in re-enabling the Other OS feature that Sony eliminated via firmware update and to allow developers to run homebrew code on the PlayStation 3.
Sony had managed to obtain an initial temporary injunction against Geohot, but he was still contesting the legal action and was seeking to have it thrown out on grounds of lack of personal jurisdiction.
Since the security of the PS3 was compromised, Sony introduced a new firmware version, 6.0, which eliminated some of the vulnerabilities and there were also rumors that the company was preparing a whole new version of the device with a completely new security system.