After last week’s heated developments in Sony’s PS3 antipiracy lawsuit against popular hacker George “GeoHot” Hotz, we thought that the case had reached the pinnacle of melodrama. It turns out, however, that Hotz’s temporary retreat to South America was just another small step in the development of what is turning out to be a very interesting case regarding the rights of hardware owners and the ability of giant corporations to control them.
Newly-released court documents reveal additional questions of jurisdiction in the case. Previously, Hotz’s lawyers had attempted to dismiss the case from the California, the state in which Sony Consumer Entertainment America (SCEA) had filed the case, because Hotz resides in New Jersey and the only thing tying him to the Golden State was alleged PayPal transactions. Now, Hotz’s legal team is questioning whether SCEA actually has any rights to file the case at all, as the copyright and licensing agreements present on the PS3 all lead back to Sony Japan, a separate entity:
The official reply by Hotz’ legal team filed on March 25th directly accuses SCEA of attempting to blur the lines of separation between themselves and Sony Japan:
“To be clear, Sony Japan-- not SCEA-- is responsible for manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the Playstation Computer. Sony Japan is the owner of all rights, title, and interest in, to and under the copyrights in the PS3 Programmer Tools, although SCEA misleadingly lists this information under the heading “SCEA's Copyrights and Copyright Licenses”. One of the biggest charades SCEA has enacted in this lawsuit is its masquerade as Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (“Sony Japan”), a Japanese corporation headquartered in Japan.”
SCEA is, “not even a subsidiary of Sony Japan,” the statement subsequently points out. It then goes on to claim that, while SCEA is claiming potential harm to the video games they market and sell for the PS3, “Hotz' actions have nothing to do with video games and the Code does not provide users the ability to run pirated video games or any other pirated software, as SCEA claims.”
Even accepting the terms of PSN’s Terms of Service is not enough to get Hotz in trouble with any branch of Sony, his lawyers claim (and the PSN account that SCEA purported to be tied to Hotz is now even reported to belong to somebody else):
“The PSN is merely an online gaming service that allows individuals to play video games jointly over the Internet. The PSN is a single application on the Playstation Computer, among many, that contains its own unique terms of service. Accepting any PSN TOS is analogous to accepting terms of service for a single application, such as Microsoft Word, on your personal computer -- it does not control the terms of using your personal computer, nor does it mean you have accepted the terms of such application for any other computer other than the one on which it was accepted. Such would exceed the scope of authorization.”
Furthermore, Hotz’ legal team directly accuses SCEA of abusing the “Jurisdictional Discovery Process”:
“On February 2, 2011, Mr. Hotz timely filed this Motion. Two days later, SCEA served a slew of premature and abusive discovery documents on Mr. Hotz and sent multiple third party subpoenas prior to any procedural milestone that would permit such acts. Clearly the tactic was to overwhelm Mr. Hotz by thwarting proper discovery procedure. On February 10, 2011, the abusive discovery demands were thrown out from the bench and SCEA was required to call back its abusive subpoenas. Nevertheless, SCEA issued numerous frivolous subpoenas to harass Mr. Hotz. SCEA subpoenaed Twitter, Google, Youtube, Bluehost (webhost for Mr. Hotz's site), SoftLayer (webhost for psx-scene.comand PayPal. As issued, none of those subpoenas limited categories of documents to "California" despite the limited jurisdictional discovery. After subpoenaing every entity it could think of, SCEA still has nothing (and certainly nothing admissible) to connect Mr. Hotz to California.”
At this point, the judge presiding over the case may either rule to keep the case in California despite Hotz’s claims of Sony’s “abuse”, or the case could be moved to Hotz’s home state of New Jersey. It’s also possible that the judge could dismiss the case entirely. The one thing that is certain is that nobody could’ve predicted the oddities that have cropped up in this case, and it’s anyone’s guess what will happen next. Stay tuned to MyCE for the latest.
