One thing that doesn’t puff up a company’s standing with its
customers is planting stealth spying software on their computers. The
other is making a point of taking them to court for liking your platform
too much. Witnesss the fallout after Sony filed suit against George Hotz and fellow members of Fail0verflow, a celebrated group of platform modders and hackers, for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by circumventing copy protections on the PS3 device.
Hotz eventually settled with Sony, agreeing to refrain from publishing
details of his PS3 jailbreak. But the suit was a Pyrrhic victory for
Sony: the PS3 master key was already circulating in public and Hotz took
to television and the Web to rail against Sony for its hubris before
settling – and after the ink was dry. In the meantime, Sony found itself
the target of denial of service attack from the online mischief making
group Anonymous. The subsequent security breach of Sony’s PlayStation and Station.com gaming networks that followed was, some believe, retaliation for the Hotz suit.
(Handout photo, courtesy George Hotz)
