The legal battle between Sony and the much discussed hacker named George Hotz, nicknamed GeoHot, which was looking like it may go on for a long time has just come to an abrupt end. It was announced by Sony Computer Entertainment America this morning that the lawsuit that the company had filed against Hotz in a federal court in San Francisco has been settled by the parties.
Hotz, reportedly, has agreed to a permanent restriction imposed on him against publishing any method to hack the PS3 online as a part of the settlement. However, the hacker still maintained the position that he had done nothing wrong. He said that he had never intended to make piracy easier or cause trouble to any users and was happy to have the litigation behind him. It was also declared by the settlement that Hotz was not involved in the recent attacks which the covert group called Anonymous had conducted on the websites of Sony and the PlayStation Network.
A three month long episode which had seen much legal tussle between Sony and Hotz, has been ended by this resolution which took place yesterday. The PS3’s security was broken by the hacker in January and the method was then disseminated over the internet. Sony then promptly slapped him and another hacker who collectively called themselves failOverflow with a lawsuit for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Copyright Act and the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. Sony was then granted a temporary restraining order against Hotz even as the hacker defended himself on a number of fronts. Hotz was ordered to turn over all his jailbroken PS3s and computers according to the orders. These proceedings were also complicated when Hotz went for a vacation in South America in the middle of the proceedings.
