[HH] Sony

[Tom Metro]

Kurt Keville wrote:
> Indeed. Sony's withering assault on their customer base is well
> documented in places like...
> http://blog.makezine.com/2011/02/24/sonys-war-on-makers-hackers-and-innovators/

Good write-up of Sony's anti-hacker activities. Though half way through
it starts to feel repetitive as Sony repeats the same bad behavior over
and over.

Hard to believe this is the same Sony that in the 1970 used fair use to
defend its manufacture of video cassette recorders. What a 180 degree
switch of attitude. (All stemming from their acquisition of a Hollywood
studio.)

It also illustrates how dangerous a bad law, like the DMCA can be. Such
as when they sued a hacker who reverse engineered their toy dog robot.
The hacker never released the technique he used to crack Sony's
copyright protection nor any Sony code, yet they still sued him under
DMCA for breaking encryption, which in this case resulted in zero
copyright violations.

This is identical to the iPhone jailbreaking situation. Fortunately the
law was recently changed to eliminate that problem.

That posting was from 2011. Anyone know what happened to the law suits
against George Hotz (who published techniques for breaking the
PlayStation firmware so you could run Linux on it).

 -Tom