This is discovery for a trial, right? What's newsworthy about this? You don't have a right to be free from search and seizure period, only to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, which is to say: (1) demands to compromise your privacy and security have to be mitigate by due process, and (2) Congress can't in the long run be allowed to enact laws that unduly compromise that due process.
It isn't the DMCA per se that's allowing Sony to search the guy's drive, is it? It's civil law procedure. Companies routinely have to fork over years and years worth of mail spools for similar reasons.
> Sony is also asking Judge Illston to order Google to surrender the IP addresses [.pdf] and other identifying information of those who have viewed or commented about the jailbreak video on Hotz’ private YouTube page. The game maker is also demanding that Twitter provide the identities of a host of hackers who first unveiled a limited version of the hack in December.
Do you think the above is "reasonable" per definition? In essence, anyone who stumbled across some page where the youtube video was embedded is now suspect. Anyone who made comments on twitter is now suspect. And if you slide down the slippery slope, all of us are now suspect for discussing it here on HN.
The above is excessive, and hence, unreasonable. The lawyers of the plaintiff intentionally asked for the moon, gift wrapped, and the judge agreed. The lawyers from Sony did their job correctly, as they are expected to ask for everything they possibly can to help their case. The judge, Susan Illston, failed to do her job. She was supposed to take the expected unreasonable requests from the lawyers, weigh their merit, and rule on a limited compromise to both enable discovery and protect the privacy of the people. The discovery process is not an excuse for excessive privacy invasion.
That's just the above issue of other parties.
As for the issue of searching the hard disk of George Hotz... --it's an interesting debacle. Discovery is very important but it comes down to where and how one draws the lines. Opinions of reasonable and unreasonable will vary.
The very next sentence after what you quoted is "A hearing on that is scheduled next month." That's in the future. Shouldn't you wait until after the hearing to say the judge "failed"?
This was exactly what I dove into the comments to say. You're 100% correct; this is routine discovery.
Look, do I like the merits of Sony's arguments? Absolutely not. Do I hope this kid wins? Yes. But there's nothing that nuts going on so far; save your anger for the verdict.
As an aside, who ever is advising Sony is an idiot. The bad publicity this is getting Sony has already far outweighed the value of any verdict they get (in both monetary and deterrent value), and anyone could have seen that before they even filed the lawsuit.
As an aside, who ever is advising Sony is an idiot. The bad publicity this is getting Sony has already far outweighed the value of any verdict they get (in both monetary and deterrent value), and anyone could have seen that before they even filed the lawsuit.
Not sure I agree. Who is not buying a PS3 because of this? Who has stopped buying games? Nearly nobody, and the lawyers are on salary anyway.
The risk that Sony takes by allowing "hacking" to happen is that nobody will write software for their platform, and then the platform dies. Content-creating megacorps want uber-strict DRM, or they take their ball and go home (or to Microsoft). It's stupid of them, but Sony doesn't want to go to a meeting with a content house and say, "anyone can pirate your stuff if they want to".
Hence all the DRM schemes that don't work. They are not to prevent you from copying things, they are so Sony (or Amazon, or Hulu, or...) can tell the content creators "oh yeah, your shit will be secure". It's not, but they made the bean counters happy.
So really, this seems like the right action for a psychopathic corporation to take. Maximize BS and maximize profits.
It's a shame someone with a clue is caught in the middle.
> Not sure I agree. Who is not buying a PS3 because of this? Who has stopped buying games?
I've boycotted Sony since the rootkit. I guess I might be "nearly nobody" but I have put Sony products back on the shelf several times in the past few years.
With almost 50 million units sold, I can assure you that the consumers that a fraction of a fraction of those consumers know what a "rootkit" is. The costs of the lawsuit are likely much greater than the opportunity cost in lost sales due to bad publicity, so they are well aware of the costs involved. I don't agree with their stance regarding this issue, but you can't blame them for wanting to protect their platform.
Not sure I agree. Who is not buying a PS3 because of this? Who has stopped buying games? Nearly nobody, and the lawyers are on salary anyway.
I take your point, I have yet to see an organized boycott. Nor would this by itself cause me to have any hesitation about Sony.
Yet, this taken together with some of their many other actions in attempting to control the PS, primarily removing the other OS option, has affected my opinion of Sony and what they are likely to do in the future. I'm not about to take a sledgehammer the PS3 I have now. Yet, when the next generation of consoles comes out, it will weight as one factor about which one I go with.
Yeah, everyone who's disgusted by Sony enough to care will have stopped buying their products a long time ago, probably starting with the rootkit debacle.
The bad publicity this is getting Sony has already far outweighed the value of any verdict they get (in both monetary and deterrent value), and anyone could have seen that before they even filed the lawsuit.
Sony shipped rootkits on audio CDs, and people still line up to give them money. I don't think a DMCA trial, or 100,000 of them, is going to matter to Sony's loyal customers.
hmmm, your definition of due process seems to be different than "good things happen to people we like, bad things happen to people we don't like." Are you sure that's how things are supposed to work?
I absolutely do not understand what you are trying to say with this comment. Can you make your point more directly? My point is: hard drives and mail spools get handed over to the opposition in civil cases all the time. It's called "discovery".
If you genuinely forgot it, after having long encrypted it in good faith with the intent of simply accessing it more securely? Nothing.
Otherwise: somewhat uncertain.
You probably can't be compelled to testify against yourself, but you definitely can't deliberately use encryption as a defense against discovery anymore than you can destroy evidence by degaussing your hard drive.
> you definitely can't deliberately use encryption as a defense against discovery anymore than you can destroy evidence by degaussing your hard drive.
The main problem with "forgetting" the passphrase is that they're unlikely to believe you and the judge may rule that the jury is allowed to hold it against you. You're absolutely right about that.
That said, there's a more subtle problem with DRMed media: it's entirely possible to have large, random files on your computer that are, in fact, movies and such that you no longer have the rights to play. If you can't prove that the expired movies are just that, rather than encrypted files of your own, you might get in trouble.
Hopefully, they'd notice that you had an account with whatever service and the movies in question were expired and they were in such-and-such a directory with the appropriate filenames and whatnot, but you never know. I mean, Sony hid a rootkit on a music CD. You never know what crazy things they'll try to put on your computer.
This is why things like TrueCrypt's plausible deniability feature are good. Just toss some embarrassing (but not illegal) scat porn on the "fake" encrypted partition and give them that password instead.
Word. I hope he encrypted everything before he published the key so it can't be said that he is obstructing justice by encrypting his disks before he hands them over.
It isn't the DMCA per se that's allowing Sony to search the guy's drive, is it? It's civil law procedure. Companies routinely have to fork over years and years worth of mail spools for similar reasons.