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Settlement in George Hotz Case
- forwardslash 16y agoAny details on the settlement?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- AndyJPartridge 16y agoI suspect there isn't anything more to know, except who paid which legal bills.
- noonespecial 16y agoThis sounds like a job for WikiLeaks. There needs to be a bat symbol for Julian Assange.
- lloeki 16y agoMost probably the settlement includes a clause not to talk about the settlement. Also, the second clause of the club^Wsettlement is... well you get the point.
- johng 16y agoI wonder how much the anonymous pressure weighed on their decision for a quick settlement?
- roel_v 16y agoGiven the terms, probably 0.
- andrewcooke 16y agowhat are the terms? (you talk as if you know them; i can't find any info anywhere)
- sycren 16y agoProb nil as the settlement was decided at the end of march
- steipete 16y agoSucks. He should have gone down the road, fighting for his rights to legally hack the PS3.
- nkassis 16y agoYeah but at the same time it's not just him that should have to deal with all the trouble that fighting would have caused him. Sometimes you have to pick your fights.
- extension 16y agoToo bad, because he seemed to be winning and he had enough public support to take the fight as far as he wanted. He could have made an example of Sony. They will likely choose someone more vulnerable for their next victim.
- afterburner 16y ago"seemed to be winning" What do you base that on, community support? Some initial faintly favourable legal maneuvers? A specific turn of phrase in a legal book would have decided this in the end. And then been appealed, multiple times.
- tezmc 16y agoThat's easy to say when you're not the one being sued by a company with very deep pockets.
- catshirt 16y ago"Sony is glad to put this litigation behind us,” said Riley Russell, General Counsel for SCEA." likely because they realized they were being dipshits half way through. glad this case is over and i can't believe it wasted so much time. my respect and empathy goes to hotz; i'm sure his past few months were miserable.
- jonursenbach 16y agoI wonder if the recent Anonymous attacks, specifically on Howard Stringer's family, had anything to do with this.
- jarin 16y agoThe comments on that post seem awfully one-sided.
- nzmsv 16y agoWhat can't believe are the comments on that page. Are people really that eager to praise their "overlords" in the name of "better gaming"? But can there really be that many trolls? The scary part is that these are most likely real people, who like their control and surveillance just fine, and are the majority. Which means we will probably see a completely locked down internet sooner or later.
- JonnieCache 16y agoThey are 14 year old playstation fanboys, who have a religious devotion to their console brand of choice. This stems from the teenage search for identity. Having made violently strong cases for their favoured console in arguments with their friends at school, they are now ideologically wedded to this position and unable to deviate from it one iota for fear of the inconsistency being seen as weakness, and more importantly, of it undermining their own fragile sense of who they are: a Playstation Fan. It's basically a microcosm of partisan politics. Don't worry too much about it. EDIT: Alternatively they could be very lazy astroturfers. EDIT2: The comparison of console wars to partisan politics has raised another question that I've never considered before: what will happen in a few decades time when the children of people who have themselves been gaming since childhood reach their teen years? Will we see similar patterns to politics, where children tend to inherit their views from their parents without question? Will parents war with their children over their opposing views on gaming? "This family has played nintendo for four generations! I'll be damned if any son of mine is going to play an xbox 1080 under my roof!"
- nzmsv 16y agoThose were my initial thoughts as well, but my next thought was that it could very well be that the general public simply does not care about issues like open information. They are happy as long as they get their games or Facebook access, and when faced with a question about such a matter they will believe the authority on the subject. And reading HN provides false hope.
- JonnieCache 16y ago
- simias 16y agoThe comments on this blog entry scare me. Fanboyism and groupthink pushed to the limit. EDIT: ah well, I see that this opinion is shared. It kind of cheers me up. Kind of.
- tuhin 16y agoAwesome Sony. Hope you gave it to him good. Is this for real? The moment I read the comments I was like, "this is so different from the view people have on HN". Also I am sure these are kids who just swear by their consoles. Sadly they are Sony's biggest chunk of consumers.
- kenkam 16y agoAt first I was taken back by the comments but then I realised that they are the opposing camp. HN readers support Geohot while Playstation.com readers support... Sony. Just 2 sides of the story.
- simias 16y agoI can motivate my support for geohot, I'd like to hear their reasons (besides all the FUD spread everywhere by sony & friends). I thought that hackers and playstation 3 "owners" would be on the same side, given that the ultimate question here is whether they really own the console or not.
- smhinsey 16y agoI am not sure reasoned justification comes into it. It's football with words and you have to root for your team.
- saurik 16y agoand, unfortunately, it is also "more fun" to root for the "winning team", so when there are shifts in the balance of power you see shifts in the demographics of agreement. :(
- maximilianburke 16y agoFrom geohot's website: > What if SCEA 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. It'd be good PR for Sony too, lord knows they could use it. I'm also willing to accept a trade, a legit path to homebrew for knowledge of how to stop new firmwares from being decrypted. I wonder if any of those terms were met?
- mrcharles 16y agoNot a chance. Most likely Hotz realized what he was in for if he stuck it out long haul and decided it was worth having a life and a job instead. It's really unfortunate for everyone that it ended this way.
- geoffw8 16y agoYeah I don't blame the guy. Personally, I think I might have gone to south America!
- eof 16y agoThis still looks like a win for geohot though. Unless there is something missing from the agreement, a 'permanent injuction' on one person hosting information that has already spread virally is basically worthless to sony. I'm sure his idealism faded sitting on the wrong side of a table of lawyers, though.
- drstrangevibes 16y agoka...wha?! I want my money back! I didnt support him so he can settle?!
- dailyrorschach 16y agoBut you donated to a legal defense fund. You may have hoped for a different outcome, but the fund was for the defense of the individual, and in this case settlement was likely the best defense. But maybe he promised not to settle in soliciting donations, all I see is a blog post saying here is a legal defense fund. And even if he said he would demand certain things, the fact remains that he was defending himself and has to make the right call.
- drstrangevibes 16y agoNo the fund was not for the defence of an individual. You assume that the defence was for an individual and not a community. (from geohot.com) "Together, we can help fix the system". Hardly sounds self serving does it? The community rallied because it was largely felt that an attack on GH was an attack on all of us. I may have reconsidered my donation if GH had said "Together we can help save my ass"
- msbarnett 16y agoFor all you know, the settlement may have been motivated by a desire to preserve the community from a highly unfavorable precedent.
- uxp 16y agoYou could have gone to the courthouse in California and announced yourself as one of the Does who wished to be represented fairly in court if you felt that this court case involved you just as much as it involved him. In another context, GeoHot saying "Together, we ..." is much like his saying "if you want your console to be secure get in touch with me, any of you 3", and SCEA interpreting that as extorsion. If anything, it goes to prove that GeoHot is not an English major and has difficulty being succinct and direct in writing. Assuming that he actually is going to band the community together to "stick it to the man" is fairly naive. He was the one being sued, and his number one priority was to stay out of jail and not get his paycheck garnished for the next 65 years.
- yardie 16y agoMeh, PS3 is the last console I'll ever buy. I guess for Sony this is a Pyrrhic victory. What they have done is gone out of their way to prove that no, you don't own that box. You bought a box and we can change the contents.
- thedeuce 16y agoyou're the fool for ever thinking that wasn't the situation to begin with...
- dhechols 16y agosigh "Hey George. We're your new corporate overlords, telling you to keep quiet about PS3_CONSTANT_ENCRYPTION_KEY." "Ok, can we talk?" "We'll see you in court." "Shit." Time passes... "Hey Sony, here's a ton of money, leave me alone." "Ok." I cannot express how disappointed I am in this result.
- wtallis 16y agoThere's no evidence that Hotz had to pay Sony anything as part of this settlement.
- bep 16y agoGeorge Hotz is not telling much either for the moment http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/joining-sony-boycott.html http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/joining-sony-boyco...
- xentronium 16y agoYeah, it's kind of depressing that he cannot even reveal the terms of their settlement agreement. How can this even be legal?
- rudyfink 16y agoGenerally speaking, the law in the US affords one a broad ability to contract. That is to say A and B can make a deal and a court will hold them to it. This property of the law has obvious and immense value. The ability to contract is not absolute and is limited in some ways. One of the ways that freedom to contract is limited is that contracts should not contravene public policy. In general, legal settlement, as opposed to going all the way through trial, is considered to be a good thing. The parties reached an agreement they could accept with and the public did not have to use up scare resources of judicial time. Also, the public did not have to force an outcome on one of the parties.
- chopsueyar 16y agoWho's version of justice is this?
- logic 16y agoThe final judgement has been posted at psx-scene.com: http://psx-scene.com/forums/f6/settlement-george-hotz-case-84881/ http://psx-scene.com/forums/f6/settlement-george-hotz-case-8... Note that this does not include the confidential memorandum of understanding (page 1, line 20), which would contain the meat of what was actually agreed to by both parties.
- chopsueyar 16y ago
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Xuzz 16y agoIs their case against fail0verflow, who found most of the vulnerabilities geohot actually used to jailbreak it (and re-ported Linux, for example), still on? There's not many details in this post or anywhere else online.
- jevinskie 16y agoSony also dismissed the case against the rest of the defendants (f0f members included). It looked like Sony didn't bother to go after any defendant but geohot after they filed the case. However, SCEE is still suing Alexander Egorenkov (graf_chokolo) in Germany to the tune of 1,000,000 Euro.
- emullet 16y agoDoes this mean my donation to his 'defense fund' was actually paid to Sony as part of the settlement?
- Natsu 16y agoThat assumes he paid Sony something, which isn't necessarily true. Given the way things were going, I personally feel that the impetus to settle came from Sony's side, knowing they had a weak case. It's too bad we don't know all the terms.
- vitobcn 16y agoIt seems the settlement documents are available on psx-scene.com
- dcarlson 16y agoI skimmed it - It's boring. From my reading, George can't hack any more Sony products or talk about hacking Sony products, or direct anyone to talk about hacking Sony products. No money, No promises (though there is some talk about where they promise to sue each other if they do this again). That's it.
- logic 16y agoThis is the important part of what you've read: 19 On March 31,2011, Hotz met with SCEA representatives and the Parties entered 20 a confidential Memorandum of Understanding, agreeing to settle the dispute between 21 them. There's another document (that won't be revealed unless someone leaks it) that details what was actually agreed to.
- NHQ 16y agoGeoHot raised arms for a battle. George Hotz exited through the alley.
- fleitz 16y agoI wonder what the 'permanent injunction' prevents him from doing? Having been in similar situations in court facing virtually unlimited legal budgets and opposing counsel focused on PR victories I can understand why geohotz settled, however, the wording of the statement tells me that the permanent injunction agreed to actually doesn't prevent much otherwise it would be more heavily touted. I have a feeling this statement "a preliminary injunction was issued requiring Hotz to take down the postings challenged by SCEA." reveals that the injunction was to permanently remove the postings. (eg. Hotz won!)
- greyfade 16y agoIt prevents him from doing whatever's in the injunction order. ... Which is under seal, and will only ever be seen by the parties in the case, the Court clerk, and the Judge.
- lzy 16y agoFinal judgement with more details if anyone's interested, kinda disappointing actually. http://goo.gl/NAvNl http://goo.gl/NAvNl
- JonnieCache 16y agoIn future, please do not post shortlinks here.
- bep 16y agoLooks like almost complete defeat to me
- dchest 16y agoNormal link [PDF]: http://psx-scene.com/forums/attachments/f6/26802-settlement-george-hotz-case-127-stipulation.pdf http://psx-scene.com/forums/attachments/f6/26802-settlement-...
- praptak 16y ago"Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers." Yeah, right. I just hope that any manufacturers of the stuff I own will refrain from "protecting" me in a similar way.
- daimyoyo 16y agoFor me, the damage to Sony has already been done. I will never buy another Sony product as long as I live.
- madmaze 16y agoIt almost seems like the the sony comments are filtered to only display pro sony comments. Its sad to see so many people cheer for sony.
- chopsueyar 16y agoWhere's the beef? There are no real details.