AN ATTEMPT by Sony to sue hackers who published details of how to bypass the security features on the PlayStation 3 is an attack on free speech, it has been claimed. Sony claims that the disclosure has caused “irreparable injury and damage” to the firm because it allows people to run pirated games on the PS3.
However, Marcia Hofmann, an attorney with the Electronic Freedom Frontier in San Francisco, believes Sony’s lawsuit has no legal basis. “The internet is a place where freedom of speech is protected,” she says, and the code used by computer programmers counts as speech.
“Freedom of speech is protected on the internet, and that includes the code used by programmers”
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The PS3 was once considered invulnerable to hacking. But in December at the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin, Germany, a group of programmers calling themselves fail0verflow revealed they had broken specific lower levels of the PS3’s encryption system. This allowed them to run their own programs on the console.
Shortly after this, George Hotz, a US-based hacker who gained notoriety in 2007 for unlocking Apple’s iPhone, built on fail0verflow’s method to gain complete access to the PS3 by obtaining the master encryption key. Hotz then published the key and released “jailbreak” software to allow others to run unauthorised programs and pirated games on their PS3.
For a file to work on a PS3, it needs an authorised digital signature. This is generated by Sony using a pair of keys: one created by the firm, the other encrypted within the console. By discovering the master key, Hotz was able to trick the PS3 into applying Sony signatures to any file, allowing unofficial programs to run on the system.
Both fail0verflow and Hotz say that their only motivation is to run their own “homebrew” software and games on the PS3 hardware. “I do not support piracy or counterfeiting,” Hotz told 91av.
But in Sony’s motion for a temporary restraining order against the hackers to stop their methods being made public the firm claims that publishing the information encourages piracy and violates the PS3’s user agreement. The decision on whether to grant such an order was delayed last week to allow for further legal wrangling.
