George Hotz, the 21 year old New Jersey programmer behind the best known PlayStation 3 jailbreak, is not paying for his fight with Sony alone. Last month Hotz put out a call for donations on his personal blog, and the response came quickly: he opened the appeal on a Saturday and had already shut it down by the following Monday, according to Computerworld’s report on the appeal at the time.
Hotz has not said how much money came in. Before asking for help, he said he had already run up more than $10,000 in legal bills, and when he closed the appeal he wrote that he now had “enough to cover my legal fees for the time being.” He described the request as an attempt to level the playing field, noting that Sony had five lawyers working the case while he had two. His attorney, Stewart Kellar, confirmed to Ars Technica that the money was going into Hotz’s legal defense fund, as OSnews reported in February, and said the funds would allow more lawyers to join the defense.
What Sony Alleges In Its PS3 Lawsuit
Sony Computer Entertainment America filed its lawsuit in January in federal court in San Francisco, naming Hotz alongside members of the fail0verflow group and other individuals. Sony alleges that the defendants got around the PS3’s anti tampering protections, opening the door to unauthorized software and pirated games, and that they spread the code and instructions online and at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. The company’s claims rest on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Hotz rejects that characterization and has cast the case as a test of what consumers are allowed to do with hardware they own.
The first big battle is over where the case should be heard at all. Kellar has asked the San Francisco court to dismiss the suit, arguing that Hotz lives in New Jersey and falls outside that court’s jurisdiction, and he has said he expects Sony would simply refile in New Jersey if that motion succeeds. California sits under the Ninth Circuit, which ruled partly in a copyright holder’s favor in a DMCA case involving Blizzard in December. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is not representing Hotz, has criticized the suit as an attempt to discourage security research.
Sony Wins Subpoenas Covering Hotz’s Online Accounts
Meanwhile, Sony is pressing ahead with discovery. On March 3, Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero authorized subpoenas that will let Sony seek the IP addresses of visitors to Hotz’s website going back to January 2009, along with information tied to his Google, Twitter and YouTube accounts and his profile on the PSX Scene forums. The EFF called the requests overly broad, but The Register reported that Hotz agreed not to oppose the subpoenas after Sony narrowed the scope of some of them. Sony says it needs the data to identify people who downloaded the circumvention tools.
For his part, Hotz has acknowledged that he was wrong to assume the lawsuit might go away quickly, and he now expects a long fight. The donations buy him time, but with the jurisdiction question still pending and Sony’s subpoenas moving forward, the case is a long way from settled in either direction. We will keep following it as new filings arrive.