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Geohot being sued over PS3 jailbreak for "making Sony mad"

geohot

George "Geohot" Hotz has overnight defended his jailbreaking of PS3, saying he's being sued by Sony for "making" the company "mad".

Speaking on G4's Attack of the Show last night, Geohot said that his jailbreak has set "precedent" after his previous victory in jailbreaking the iPhone for the first time.

The iPhone hack challenged the law related to such hacking in the US and found it legal, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

"Currently the difference is the DMCA says specifically mobile phones, but the same precedent should apply. If they decide a phone is a closed system, where the manufacturer controls all the software that runs on it, if you can Jailbreak one closed system, why can't you Jailbreak another," he said.

"Right now, still legally, you can go to my website and download my Jailbreak for your PS3.

"It lets you install homebrew applications, which have been developed by anyone. You can develop your own application or go download some and put them on your Jailbroken PS3."

Hotz insisted that his jailbreak was not to be used for piracy and said he made a "specific effort" to make sure it was considered not to have done so.

"The way piracy was previously done doesn't work in my Jailbreak. I made a specific effort while I was working on this to try to enable homebrew without enabling things I do not support, like piracy."

Asked why he was being sued by Sony, Hotz said it was for "making Sony mad".

And when asked at the end what was coming next, Hotz joked that PSP2 was on the list.

"When does the PSP2 come out? No, I'm kidding," he said.

Sony issued a restraining order against GeoHot and hacker group fail0verflow this week for publishing the console’s root key, which has apparently exposed the hardware once and for all.

Yesterday, it was reported that jailbroken PS3 systems could be banned even without PSN access.

We published a broad piece of the recent spate of PS3 hacking yesterday morning, featuring insight from analyst Michael Pachter and Braid developer Jonathan Blow: read it here.

Watch the full Attack of the Show interview below.

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About the Author

Johnny Cullen

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Johnny has experience at a wide range of games media outlets, having written for Eurogamer, Play Magazine, PC Gamer, GameDaily, and more. He worked at VG247 pumping out news at an astonishing rate for several years. More recently, he founded the games website PlayDiaries.

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