Mikael Hed, speaking at the Midem conference in Cannes earlier today as reported by The Guardian, said the entertainment industry needs to change its perspective of looking at consumers, and the music industry can serve as an good example of what not to do.

“We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy,” he explained.

“We took something from the music industry, which was to stop treating the customers as users, and start treating them as fans. We do that today: we talk about how many fans we have.

“If we lose that fanbase, our business is done, but if we can grow that fanbase, our business will grow.”

Hed also said that taking legal action against pirates is often “futile” and all it does is help alienate thousands of potential “fans” who might have proved to be an asset for building the brand and even contribute to the overall income in future.

“Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business at the end of the day,” he said.

However, he said that an exception to the above can be made for any form of piracy that damages the company’s image or tries to rip-off paying customers, putting counterfeit merchandise as an example.

“We [have gone] DRM-free on PC. We believe people will buy the game anyway,” level artist Marek Ziemak told GameFront.

“We provide a lot of great content in the box, also in the digital version. You know, piracy is going to be there, always, in all the platforms, but it’s not our main concern. There are a lot of players who buy the game, who enjoy it really, and who try and be fair.”

“We try and deliver all the extra content for everyone who bought the game. That’s also another reason to have an original copy–to have all the patches, and all the DLC that are free if you bought the game. We try to be fair; we try to work on our products. And we actually trust people. We believe that the great majority will just buy the game.”

“And not cheat us,” lead combat designer Maciej Szczesnik added. “There are pirates who play the game, and also bought the game.”

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was pirated an estimated 4.5 million times. CD Projekt removed all DRM from the game shortly after launch, but has pursued a vigorous legal stance against pirates. Identified pirates were issued hefty fines, but the publisher later dropped the campaign following fan criticism.

“I’m so surprised that people still use DRM. We haven’t done that for seven or eight years, and the reason is that it doesn’t make sense,” Wester told Gamespy.

The executive said DRM is poor “from a gamer perspective” and provides a “terrible” experience, citing his own difficulties with Civilization III as an example.

“No one should have to purchase a product that they’re unable to install because of the DRM. People who purchase a game should have just as easy a time as those who pirate the game, otherwise it’s a negative incentive to buy a legal copy,” he argued.

But Wester also believes there’s little incentive to use DRM on the business side, either.

“I just can’t see why people are using DRM still. If you take something like Sony’s DRM, SecuROM – it’s a waste of money,” he said.

“It will keep you protected for three days, it will create a lot of technical support, and it will not increase sales. And I know this for a fact, because we tried it eight years ago, and it never worked for us.”

Wester suggested that companies sometimes used to resort to DRM because it provides an easy answer when shareholders asked how a publisher is protecting their investments, but in this day and age, that’s not a good enough excuse.

“Now, I see no reasonable explanation for why people keep on adding it,” he said.

“Especially the kind where you have to be online all the time, like Ubisoft. I think that’s, to me that’s 2003. ”

Paradox Interactive is a PC specialist publisher and developer based in Sweden. Some of its most notable recent properties include Magicka; King Arthur: The Roleplaying Game; Cities in Motion and Heart of Iron.

Thanks, Gamefront. [image]

“While it’s correct that copies of Anno [2070] include three activations and that changing hardware may trigger the need for reactivation, the vast majority of Anno customers never encounter this scenario,” Ubisoft told Rock Paper Shotgun in a statement.

“On the rare occasion when a customer does need additional activations, Ubisoft customer service is available to quickly resolve the situation, and we encourage those customers to contact us directly so that we can ensure they are able to continue to enjoy their game.”

Anybody encountering issues with Ubisoft’s DRM is encouraged to contact customer service to initiate resolution.

Anno 2070 uses a DRM system called Tages, which hit headlines this week when it was discovered that swapping out a piece of hardware counted towards each license’s three install limit.

Tages doesn’t include any option to deactivate an installation, instead leaving a config file on those computers which have had a legitimate installation on them. As RPS points out, should you reformat your harddrive, you’ll lose one of your three licenses.

As the team at Guru3D learned to their dismay, the publisher’s PC anti-piracy measures apparently can’t distinguish between a new computer and a single hardware upgrade.

Having installed three copies of Anno 2070 – the limit imposed by the DRM – the reviewers swapped in a new GPU for comparison purposes, and found themselves locked out of the game.

Developer Bluebyte unlocked the site’s key to allow the testers to continue their analysis, but Ubisoft hasn’t issued a comment.

Ubisoft has been the subject of constant ire over its anti-piracy measures over the last few years, with players reacting badly to always-on requirements; delayed PC releases; and mixed messaging. last year, Eric Chahi’s From Dust spurred so much anger Steam was forced to issue refunds.

According to the firm’s co-founder Marcin Iwinski, an outpouring of concern was expressed over the possibility a legitimate purchaser might be fingered by mistake in the process. Through legal action, the accused would be forced to pay around €750 to the firm in order to avoid going to court where fines and penalties could reach a more considerable sum.

“While we are confident that no one who legally owns one of our games has been required to compensate us for copyright infringement, we value our fans, our supporters, and our community too highly to take the chance that we might ever falsely accuse even one individual,” he said in an open letter posted by RPS.

“Our fans always have been and remain our greatest concern, and we pride ourselves on the fact that you all know that we listen to you and take your opinions to heart.”

Iwinski wanted to make it “clear” the firm still abhors piracy, despite the firm’s move.

“It hurts us, the developers. It hurts the industry as a whole,” he said. “Though we are staunch opponents of DRM because we don’t believe it has any effect on reducing piracy, we still do not condone copying games illegally.

“We’re doing our part to keep our relationship with you, our gaming audience, a positive one. We’ve heard your concerns, listened to your voices, and we’re responding to them. But you need to help us and do your part: don’t be indifferent to piracy. If you see a friend playing an illegal copy of a game – any game – tell your friend that they’re undermining the possible success of the developer who created the very game that they are enjoying.

“Unless you support the developers who make the games you play, unless you pay for those games, we won’t be able to produce new excellent titles for you.”

Back in December, the firm estimated The Witcher II had been pirated “4.5 million times”.

Thanks, Blue.

According to a statement released on its forums, Epic PR manager Dana Cowley wrote: “We do not support the current version of SOPA. We are members of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), a trade organization that is working with legislators to refine the bill.

“Epic Games supports efforts that would stop overseas websites profiting from pirating our games, but we have to do that in a way that’s compatible with freedom of speech and due process of law,” she said.

Epic is the first member of ESA to officially state it does not support the current version of SOPA, despite reports that EA, Nintendo, and Sony had dropped support of the bill. However, Microsoft, which is also a member of ESA, spoke out against the bill along with Adobe and Apple through the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

RPS as a running list of ESA members which support and do not support the bill through here.

Thanks, Joystiq.

In its annual report, TorrentFreak noted users downloaded a pirated version of Crysis 2 over 4 million times during 2011.

An out of date, incomplete build of Crysis 2 hit torrent sites a good month before its release in March 2011, but the site reports pirating of Crytek’s sequel significantly increased once the retail version became available.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 took second place with 3,650,000 downloads, with Battlefield 3 in third at 3,510,000.

Other interesting snippets from the report include Gears of War 3 as the top pirated Xbox 360 title – another leak victim – with 890,000 downloads, and the huge discrepancy between platforms; the PlayStation 3 didn’t make it onto any of the top ten lists, despite its root key leak early in the year.

Thanks, gamesradar.

Speaking in an interview with PC Gamer, Iwinski said that while it’s impossible to calculate the exact number of times Geralt’s latest has been pirated, the 4.5 million figure complied by the firm is probably a conservative estimate.

“I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first six to eight weeks there was around 20-30k people downloading it at the same time,” he said.

“Let’s take 20k as the average and let’s take six weeks. The game is 14GB, so let’s assume that on an average not-too-fast connection it will be six hours of download. Six weeks is 56 days, which equals to 1344 hours; and with six hours of average download time to get the game it would give us 224 downloads, then let’s multiply it by 20k simultaneous downloaders.

“The result is roughly 4.5 million illegal downloads. This is only an estimation, and I would say that’s rather on the optimistic side of things; as of today we have sold over one million legal copies, so having only 4.5-5 illegal copies for each legal one would be not a bad ratio. The reality is probably way worse.”

Iwinski said that despite such a large loss of probable income for the company, it still maintains the belief that “DRM does not work”, because no matter how hard a company tries to protect its product, “it will be cracked in no time” and isn’t worth the pain and difficulty it causes “legal gamers.”

“From the very beginning our main competitors on the market were pirates,” he said.
“We of course experimented with all available DRM and copy protection, but frankly nothing worked. Whatever we used was cracked within a day or two, massively copied and immediately available on the streets for a fraction of our price.

“We did not give up, but came up with new strategy: we started offering high value with the product – like enhancing the game with additional collectors’ items like soundtracks, making-of DVDs, books, walkthroughs, etc.

“This, together with a long process of educating local gamers about why it makes sense to actually buy games legally, worked. And today, we have a reasonably healthy games market.”

Thanks, Eurogamer.

“In that Battlefield 3 is not available for purchase in Iran, we can only hope the ban will help prevent pirated copies reaching consumers there,” the publisher told IndustryGamers.

“If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable,” Newell told The Cambridge Student.

“Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer’s use or by creating uncertainty. Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company.”

These latest comments echo Valve’s believe that piracy is not related to pricing.

The full interview includes some interesting discussion of eSports and a reiteration of Newell’s disgust with the restrictions enforced by console networks. Hit the link above for the whole thing.

Thanks, Gamespy.

“Our statistics from multiplayer show that for every three legitimate buyers playing their game in multiplayer, there are 100 (failed) attempts to play with a pirated version,” Bohemia CEO Marek Španěl told PC Gamer.

“This indicates that piracy is an extremely widespread problem on PC, and it’s also really worrying for us as a mid-sized, independent, PC-oriented developer. We do not have any such data for single-player, but I’m afraid there the ratio of pirates to legitimate gamers is undoubtedly much worse,” he added.

“It’s very difficult. Companies and teams invest a lot into game development, and with such widespread piracy, it’s extremely tough to get the investment back.”

Bohemia has gained an element of notoriety for its use of a DRM system called DEGARDE (formerly known as FADE), which introduces bugs to pirated copies of the game.

“The motto is: Pirated games are not worth playing, original games do not degrade. Some of the symptoms are funny, usually annoying,” Španěl explained.

“In the Arma series, players with pirated copies have lower accuracy with automatic weapons in both single player and multiplayer, and occasionally turn into a bird with the words ‘Good birds do not fly away from this game, you have only yourself to blame’” While we know we will never stop piracy, we use this as a way to make our stand that piracy is not right, that it has a serious negative impact on PC games developers.”

Španěl described DEGRADE as a “supplement” to more common DRM systems like always-on and online registrations, which are often required by publishers before they’ll sign off on a PC game.

“Our approach is to remove conventional DRM not too long after the initial game’s release to ensure as smooth an experience as possible for our legitimate users and still appeal to our distribution and publishing channels,” he commented.

“We’re trying to cut off this vicious circle where piracy hurts owners of legitimate copies ‘protected’ with annoying copy protection DRM systems, which may lead to more piracy. That is why, for example, nearly all games on Sprocket, our online store, are DRM-free. Arma 1 and 2 are already copy-protection-free everywhere, and have been for a long time.”

Bohemia’s latest title is Take on Helicopters, available now on PC.

Thanks, Shack.

In a mail sent out by the firm, a link to the official forums brought attention to a poster asking why his game screen goes “blurry like I’m under water sometimes” and even posted a shot of what the game was doing as an example.

Turns out, the player was using a pirated copy of the game, and the longer he played the blurrier it got, thanks to FADE.

“One of the aspects of developing any game in this modern age is how to protect it, it’s widely known that as soon as any game is released there are those who are looking to download it for free, who for whatever reason feel that their right is to not pay for something despite all the thousands of hours that have gone into its development,” said Bohemia in the statement.

“Obviously game developers have a responsibility to themselves to try to protect their company’s future, but also a responsibility to the community that supports them by buying their titles, no gamer who has spent their hard earned money to buy a game wants to be playing MP against others who didn’t buy their game, no addon maker wants to have things they created over countless hours downloaded and used by people who didn’t buy the game it’s intended for.

“That is why we try to come up with unique and irrefutable ways to stop people from playing our games without paying for them, that’s why Take On Helicopters shipped with our unique antipiracy countermeasures.”

Back in 2001 when the original Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis was released, the company had FADE implemented which causes game performance to degrade. Thus the reason those playing a pirated version of Take on Helicopters will notice morphed, watery image degradation.

Those who own a legitimate version of Take On Helicopters need not worry about the degradation of visual quality, according to the developer.

“Piracy is a big problem for Bohemia Interactive, as an independent PC developer, and we’re trying to focus our support as much as possible towards users of legitimate copies,” the statement continued.

“Counterfeit copies of our games may degrade and, moral aspects aside, we certainly recommend only playing the original version. We have a free public demo version of Take On Helicopters in the development pipeline for those that prefer to test it before buying.”

“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” the Valve co-founder said at a conference in Seattle, as reported by Geekwire.

“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”

Newell revealed the startling news that Russia has become Valve’s second-largest European market.

“For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia.

“The people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. So that as far as we’re concerned is asked and answered. It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.”

Valve recently embarked on a partnership with Xsolla to allow Russian Steam users to add cash payments to their accounts via kiosks.

The full transcript, available through the link above, continues Newell’s discussion of pricing, outlining some fascinating economic experiments.

“Our main competition has always been piracy not other digital platforms,” managing director Guillaume Rambourg told MCV.

“Despite being aimed at a niche audience, GOG.com has become the second most popular digital distribution platform for gamers. Steam is obviously competing in another league here, both in terms of scale and target market. Still, our niche is comfortable and shields us from the competition, which allows us to keep on cultivating our singularity and propose a pleasant alternative to gamers.”

Not competing with Valve;s juggernaut doesn’t mean GOG.com has it easy, but the strategies it has adopted to combat piracy seem to work.

“To beat piracy, our offer to gamers had to be both hassle-free and rewarding. If you make the overall experience more troublesome than downloading and playing an illegal copy, then all you can achieve is encouraging users to give piracy a try,” the executive commented.

“Adding technical constraints on such products would only encourage piracy and that’s why we decided to do exactly the opposite. We reward users by providing them with a fair pricing policy worldwide, tons of free goodies, and by solving their technical problems, rather than sending them back to the rights holders.

“Let’s be honest: it is very easy for any gamer to pirate a PC game these days, so the last thing we want to do is to impact loyal gamers. These people should be rewarded for buying PC products in 2011 and beyond, and spread the good message out there.”

Rambourg said that GOG has been successful wooing publishers to its cause because it turns “invisible losses into visible profits”. Rather than squandering time and resources in legal pursuit of “pirates”, publishers can trust GOG to establish trusting relationships with “abandonware” sites turned genuine business affiliates.

“When we sign a title and make it legally available, those websites remove it from their catalogue and instead direct traffic to GOG.com to help us make the back-catalogue segment a viable and clean digital market.”

Good Old Games resurrects classic PC games which are no longer available at retail, making them compatible with current Windows operating systems and offering them at low cost without DRM.

The Paris Court of Appeals declared six French companies guilty of the “importation, sale and distribution of game copier devices”, overturning a 2009 decision.

The guilty parties have been hit with a cumulative total of €460,000 in criminal fines, €4.8 million in damages, and suspended prison sentences.

France was one of the few Western European territories to allow sale of the devices after Nintendo began a worldwide effort to combat their sale. Flash or R4-type cards enable pirated and custom software to be played on the DS,

Speaking with GameIndustry.biz at Unite 11 in San Francisco, Goodale discussed how his own personal experiences as a software pirate in his youth taught him to appreciate the positive effects of piracy in establishing future demand for a product. “Piracy can be a way to seed a market. Nobody will ever fully conquer the piracy problem, but we can certainly turn it to our advantage, and I think that’s what we’ve done in China.”

Goodale explained his stance came from his experience as an original DOS, Lotus 123 user whose future purchases were influenced by pirated software. “I heard of this thing called Excel, but I couldn’t imagine going away from lotus 123 – it’s what I knew. Then somebody gave me an illegal copy of Excel, and I loved it, and I’ve purchased it ever since,” he said.

In Unity’s introductory keynote address they revealed that the four cities with the most Unity sessions per month, “legal or otherwise”, are Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai and Nei Hu.

Unity Technologies are responsible for the UNITY: Game Development Tool.

Thanks, Destructoid.

Egamer reports the national Commercial Crime Unit discovered and seized “various state of the art computers, circumvention software packages, jailbreak USB devices, PS3 consoles and hard drives” as well as “fake PS2 games, original PS3 games, believed to be used as masters and documentation” during the raid last Tuesday.

One suspect was arrested and held, in what has been called the “first PS3 circumvention arrest in the world”. The case will be tried in the Specialized Commercial Crimes Court.

The South African Federation Against Copyright Theft had made criminal complaints against the organisation, which apparently ran out of someone’s house.

Thanks, Kotaku.

The news was confirmed via the Driver:SF Twitter feed whilst another Tweet specified that the console versions can be played offline and will require ‘Uplay’ to be activated just once to gain access to multiplayer and bonus features.

A ‘Uplay Passport’, Ubisoft’s version of EA’s Online Pass scheme, is included with every new version of the game but anyone buying a Uplay-enabled title second-hand will have to fork out £7.99 for PC and PS3 versions or 800 MS Points for 360 versions.

Aside from this news, Driver: San Francisco is shaping up rather well, as time with both the single-player and multiplayer modes indicate.

Driver: San Francisco launches for 360, PS3, PC and Mac on August 30 in the US, September 1 in Europe and September 2 in the UK.

A separate Wii version, with a different storyline and gameplay focus, is also is the works with more details being released at a later date.

Thanks, EG.

“Our game was hugely pirated – we don’t fucking care,” Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen said during the latest Dark Zero podcast, as reported by RockPaperShotgun.

“If there are let’s say 200,000 copies of Super Meat Boy that are getting passed around for free, that’s 200,000 people who are playing the game.

“If they like this game there’s a really high probability of their friends coming around and seeing it or them posting about it on their blogs. And it’s not cool to go round and say I really like this game that I stole, so they’re not going to say that. So it’s going to come around to sales.”

Thanks, Gamefront.

[image]

In an illustrated diary-like entry over at 1UP, Parish takes a positive approach – “at least I know how to spot a bootleg now.”

He explains how things seemed off as soon as he opened the parcel, including the “texture and construction of the box” and oddly-pixelated text printed on the back. It wasn’t until he opened the corrugated cardboard box that he realised the truth.

“There was no question once I actually looked at the unit,” Parish writes. “This is a complete fake. It’s an amazing fake to be sure, but definitely not a legit system.”

Rather than storm around the apartment, breaking things and vowing never to purchase anything online ever again, Parish took a deep breath and decided to share his experiences, in the hope that it may help others spot fakes.

Keep an eye out for “pock-marked” or discoloured plastic, which doesn’t meet manufacturer’s usually-high standards. Edges which don’t quite meet flush is another giveaway, along with mis-aligned text, and other relatively subtle cosmetic flaws.

For what it’s worth, the console is “practically perfect”, Parish explains. It feels the same, and – importantly – it all works. Of course, there’s no after-purchase Nintendo support, and no guarantee that it will continue to work, but – in the short term at least – this is one of the better bootleg stories we’ve heard.

Thanks, Jeremy, for sharing your story!

The group has outlined four points of contention relating to the way Sony and various journalists have handled the situation, many of them pointing fingers at the group (whohas never been known to be involved with direct theft against people).

A recent article in the Financial Times is apparently the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, being riddled with inconsistencies, assumptions and outright inaccurate information. The article, by Joseph Menn, misrepresents the origins of Anonymous itself, and refers to information gathered from Aaron Barr, the former CEO of humiliated security firm HBGary.

Anonymous also proposes that, perhaps, the entire PSNgate affair is a careful smokescreen, constructed to deflect blame from Sony’s servers not meeting credit card security standards.

Whether or not you believe what it’s saying, Anonymous is going to great lengths to defend its reputation. The allegations its making and some of the information that came out of the recent Congressional hearing doesn’t really show electronics giant Sony in the nicest of lights.

The latest news from the Japanese company is that it plans to restart PSN services fully by May 31st, even as the promised partial restoration by May 8th failed to go ahead.

For more information (and a good read), check out the entire press release, which closes with the cryptic lines:
“Apparently Sony will have to learn the hard way that corporate malfeasance will not go unpunished. When the dust settles Sony may have more to fear from a massive class action lawsuit by their user base than the brief actions of the Global Hacker Nerd Brigade, Anonymous… Let THE GAMEs begin. :>”

While links to the firmware running have been posted on YouTube and links have been circulating for days, a “moderator” from PSX-Scene last night posted on Reddit to claim that the software had allowed hackers unlimited access to retail PSN content via fake credit card numbers.

The firmware essentially turns a retail PS3 into a dev kit, and makes PSN believe the machine is part of Sony’s developer network. As it’s a trusted party, the network then fails to check details such as credit card numbers, meaning those using the hack were able, apparently, to download as much content from PSN’s retail servers as they liked.

According to that post, developers have now been told that “only 3.60+ debug firmwares will be allowed on the dev network anymore. All earlier versions will be cut. If you want to retain your access you need to contact Sony and upgrade to 3.60 debug firmware.”

While we’re told it’s true that hackers gained access to PSN retail content through this hack, it is not at all confirmed that this was the reason Sony took PSN offline last Wednesday.

Sony’s developer and retail networks are independent – theoretically meaning the developer network could be closed down, leaving the retail network in action – and patching out the firmware in question is supposedly trivial.

Sony said last week that PSN has been taken offline thanks to an “external intrusion”.

We’ll ask Sony for comment.

Said the firm: “SEGA is committed to supporting any fans that take an interest in our games, and where possible we do so by involving them in Beta tests and other development, marketing or research opportunities. However we need to protect our intellectual property rights and this may result in us requesting that our fans remove online imagery, videos or games in some instances.”

This, it seems, is one of those instances.

Giant Bomb reported that Bombergames repeatedly sent permission requests to Sega, asking that the remake be approved.

After inferring that Sega was happy for them to go ahead, they released what was to be the final version on the SorR blog.

Sega quickly got in touch, ordering the team to remove their homage. It took eight years to make.

Streets of Rage originally released for Mega Drive in 1991.

“Congratulations, Sony,” a spokesperson for the anarchic collective wrote on its site over the weekend. “You have now received the undivided attention of Anonymous.

“Your recent legal action against our fellow hackers, GeoHot and Graf_Chokolo, has not only alarmed us, it has been deemed wholly unforgivable.”

The post goes on to accuse Sony of using the courts to “censor” information on its product; ‘victimising’ users for their knowledge; and privacy violations.

Venture Beat reports the movement against Sony is a continuation of Operation Payback, which targeted companies perceived as betraying WikiLeaks after the leaking of US Government documents triggered massive media attention.

No major DDOS attacks, one of Anonymous’s usual tools, have been reported as yet.

Sony is suing George “GeoHot” Hotz among a number of other hackers for the publication of the PS3 root key by GeoHot, and subsequent proliferation of piracy-enabling custom firmware. The most recent report from the ongoing court case sees Hotz denying Sony’s claims that he lied about having a PlayStation Network account.

[image]

Sony yesterday accused Hotz, who is being sued regarding the publication of PS3′s root key in January, of failing to hand over hard drives relating to his hacking activity and travelling to South America as an “excuse”.

Speaking on his blog, Hotz said: “Factually, it’s true I’m in South America, on a vacation I’ve had planned and paid for since November. I mean, it is Spring break; hacking isn’t my life. Rest assured that not a dime of legal defense money would ever go toward something like this.

“And of course Townsend [Sony's law firm in the case - Ed] loves the idea of painting me as an international fugitive. I have been in contact with my lawyers almost every day; I would not let the case suffer. That said, I also won’t let this ridiculous lawsuit run my life either. Then the fearmongerers win.”

“Factually, it’s true I’m in South America – on a vacation I’ve had planned and paid for since November.”

Hotz’s attorney, Stewart Kellar, added that Hotz has, in fact, forked over his gear, and did not go on the lam with PayPal donations towards his legal costs.

The lawyer told IGN that Sony’s claims that Hotz “deliberately removed integral components of his impounded hard drives” are a misunderstanding.

“The ‘integral components’ SCEA is talking about are stock controller cards, not the hard drives themselves,” he said.

The neutral party who received the hard drives from GeoHot reportedly had to explain to Sony representatives what hard drive controller cards do.

“Those controller cards have since been provided to the neutral so the point is moot,” he added.

Controller cards of a compatible model could have been substituted in place of the now-supplied originals.

Kellar staunchly protested rumours that GeoHot had funded a trip to South America with Paypal donations intended for his legal costs.

“As for any question as to whether Mr. Hotz has used donation money to take a trip to South America, that’s pretty silly,” he said.

“Litigating against a massive company like Sony, who is represented by five attorneys, is very costly for a 21-year-old. The donation money George has received is being used exclusively for his legal defense. If there are any funds left after the lawsuit, George is planning to donate the money to the [Electronic Frontier Foundation].”

The attorney added: “You can never take a vacation from a lawsuit. Mr. Hotz has had to make himself available 24/7 for this litigation, which has been quite demanding on him.

“You have to remember that Mr. Hotz didn’t choose to fight this battle, but now that he has been sued, he has put his heart into fighting this case that has enormous implications for consumers worldwide.”

Sony is suing GeoHot and other hackers over the publication of the PlayStation 3′s root key, allowing custom firmwares which support illegal backups of games.

Thanks, Kotaku.