It’s the jailbreak heard round the world. Based on Geohot’s success in earlier, similar lawsuits, we assumed that his proceedings with Sony over the PS3 jailbreak would follow suit. Well, not exactly. Sony is successful in its first stab.

No, George “Geohot” Hotz isn’t going to jail just yet, but the judge overlooking the “jurisdictional discovery process” proceedings has ruled that Sony can have information from at least four major sources.

It can have info from: Bluehost, which hosts Geohot’s site, for who downloaded the jailbreak; Twitter, for any tweets made by Hotz; Google Blogspot, for any comments made on Geohot’s blog; and YouTube (also Google) for user data related to who watched Geohot’s jailbreak video.

My first gut reaction was that Sony was not only going after Geohot for offering the jailbreak, but also all the people who ended up using it. SCEA might take that path a little later, but for now, this user info is meant to maintain that “many of the downloaders and commenters are from Northern California and that Hotz’s hacking efforts were aimed at Californians.”

I call bull — anyone with a PS3 could be interested in this kind of stuff — but Sony is trying to prevent the case from moving to New Jersey from the Bay Area. Jersey is where Geohot hacked his PS3 in the first place.

[via Wired]

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As you may have heard, Sony is filing a lawsuit against Hotz and the rest of the fail0verflow team for “jailbreaking” the PlayStation 3. The DMCA has been updated to allow for the jailbreaking of “closed OS” devices, but the wording is restricted to mobile phones like Android and iOS. That’s the loophole that Sony is trying to use in this case.

In the video interview posted below from G4′s Attack of the Show, Hotz says it’s all because he made Sony “mad.” You see, it’s not even really an issue of piracy; Hotz just wanted to unlock the “Other OS” feature that was taken away in a recent PS3 firmware update. He wants to run homebrew. “The way piracy was previously done [on PS3] doesn’t work in my jailbreak”, he says. “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.”

Considering that Hotz was able to set quite a precedent with the iPhone jailbreak and the subsequent win over the Apple lawsuit, I don’t see why his lawyers can’t extend that precedent to non-mobile closed-OS devices like the PS3 too.

The post Sony taking on iPhone jailbreaker GeoHotz and the DMCA appeared first on Mobile Magazine.