George Hotz, the hacker better known as “Geohot,” started a blog over the weekend – aptly titled “Geohot Got Sued” – an effort in part to raise cash for his legal battle with Sony.
“This is war,” he says in the first post, arguing that Sony has declared war on hackers. Indeed, Hotz has been in the middle of a heated fight with Sony over the his release of a jailbreak for the Playstation 3. Sony claims that this violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, and that the jailbreak released by Hotz would enable users to play pirated video games on their consoles.
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Geohot’s blog is part fundraiser, part rant, part defense, and to that end, Hotz writes three facts, claiming he’s never pirated a PS3 game in his life, nor encouraged others to do so, he’s never played PlayStation online, and has never hacked anything he didn’t own.
That last argument is an important part of Hotz’s legal defense, as he contends that the Playstation should be viewed no differently than a mobile phone, which under DMCA regulations, is legal to jailbreak. However, the DMCA regulations do not mention gaming consoles specifically, which has left room for Sony’s legal efforts against the jailbreaking. Those efforts have included a restraining order against Hotz, forcing him to take down all mention of the jailbreak from the Web.
Hotz notes that battling Sony has been costly. “Sony has five lawyers, I have two.” He started a fundraising effort via the blog over the weekend, which has been so successful that he’s already closed the “first round of donations.” “Things are looking up money wise,” Hotz writes, saying he expects to be able to hire more lawyers.
Clearly Geohot is not going down without a fight.
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