Sony and George Hotz settle

According to a joint statement published on the US Playstation Blog, Sony Computer Entertainment America and hacker George Hotz (Geohot) have settled their outstanding lawsuit. According to court documents published by Groklaw, Hotz is now permanently injuncted and may not engage in any unauthorised access of a Sony product; reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble a Sony product; disable, bypass or circumvent any encryption, security or authentication of a Sony product; traffic in any devices which may circumvent Sony product security or assist others to engage in such acts. Hotz had previously released a homebrew signing kit and published the PlayStation 3's signing key.

The damages from violating the injunction are capped at $250,000 with a $10,000 penalty per violation. As part of the settlement, Hotz dropped his outstanding jurisdictional challenges to the Sony action. Other details of the settlement were not disclosed. In his personal blog, Hotz wrote that he was "joining the SONY boycott. I will never purchase another SONY product" and encouraged others to follow his example.

The joint statement notes that the agreement in principle was reached on 31 March, days before the Anonymous internet movement launched their attacks upon Sony as punishment for attempting to prosecute Hotz. The statement notes that Hotz was not involved in any of the recent attacks on Sony's web sites and services. Although the Hotz case is now settled, Anonymous was also protesting about Sony's treatment of Alexander Egorenkov, aka Graf_Chokolo; that legal case is still ongoing as is the remainder of the class action suit against Sony for removing the "OtherOS" option which allowed Linux to run on the PlayStation 3.

(djwm)