Judge Allows Subpoenas For GeoHot YouTube Viewers, Blog Visitors 306
PhrostyMcByte writes "Stepping up Sony's lawsuit against PS3 jailbreak developer George Hotz, this Thursday a judge approved multiple subpoenas which seek logs of all viewers and commenters to his YouTube video, visitors to his blog and website, and all information associated with his Twitter account."
Go for it (Score:5, Interesting)
I will watch the youtube videos just to make extra work for Sony - even if it's only a second or two of their time. I would love for them to come knocking - I don't own a PS3 (nor intend to), never owned a PS2 and my wife's PS1 is collecting dust in my basement. In fact, except for the PS1 only Nintendo has made it inside the walls of my house.
Oh, and I'm Canadian. *flips Sony the bird*
Re:I'm really getting tired of all this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah absolutely. I'm an audio engineer for over 20 years now and when I started Sony owned the broadcast equipment market. Then some time during the nineties we began to realise that this stuff was going wrong *a lot*. Their DAT players although standard in many ways failed like no other brand. Panasonic took over that one and I changed my preferences to only buy Trinitron products - which in the CRT days were the best. Then they started failing quite badly too - but not before they'd mugged me for a large multisync CRT that died after about three years. Something very wrong with Sony and has been for years.
Re:Get rid of your private, individual IP numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
Once IPv6 really starts being used (granted at this rate that's years off yet, despite IPv4 having officially "run out"), with its huge range, I would not be surprised to see a push from large corporations to try and mandate that IP addresses are directly linkable to people.
Re:Like Sony cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm really getting tired of all this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for xxxxx many years ago and we had a massive joint project with Sony to create an open reel digital multitrack standard. It failed ultimately but I did learn of the prejudices of the Japanese engineers. Even then (late 80s) the word was that Sony was making deliberately short-lived consumer products which reflected the extremely fast turnover of their domestic market. In the rich parts of Tokyo you could (apparently) retrieve fully working VCR's etc from trash - things discarded for the latest model. Sony I think built this planned obsolescence into their products as they thought consumers were not interesting in having a VCR work for say 5 years.
Probably the peak of Sony design was late70s to early80s and since then it's been laurel-resting and marketing. I too miss the old Sony but I guess Apple have taken that now.
Re:I'm really getting tired of all this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the age of the Sega Master System and the NES, both Sega and Nintendo tried to use "drm" to lock out third-party developers, so only Sega/Nintendo games would be able to run on the respective hardware. Developers didn't like this, so they bypassed it. Both companies sued these "hacker" "pirate" developers. In both cases, the cases were thrown out with prejudice, but not before the judges verbally tore Sega/Nintendo a new one. One judge said if they ever hear a peep from Sega again on the issue, they will invalidate their trademark on Sega. (Sega's lock-in technique was to have the console check to see if the first 4 bytes of the ROM were "SEGA" and then sue for Trademark violations).
Not that much later, even watching a video about installing software not signed by the cartel can get you arrested and thrown in prison for a decade or longer. Obviously something has changed. But you're right, it's not the courts that were bought and "convinced" to change their minds. Installing third-party software was made illegal by the DMCA. It was politicians who were bought. And for how much? It's all public, just look at how much Sony and Microsoft and Apple and Nintendo (etc.) have paid to various politicians, with the "understanding" that if they don't get the laws they want, those payments will stop. This is not a bribe because the money comes before the "request", I guess, or something. I'm sure a politician can explain why it's not a bribe.
On the other hand, the DMCA has exceptions for breaking DRM for the purpose of third-party compatibility, so maybe the OP was right, judges just might have been paid off to ignore such exceptions and enforce vendor lock-in, outlawing jailbreaking. This is bad news for people who jailbreak iPhones, too, as it shows that even explicit exceptions to the law can be ignored if you just throw enough money at the legal system.