The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a US-based non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organisation, has called out Sony’s lawsuit against PS3 hackers George “GeoHot” Hotz and collective fail0verflow, as potentially “dangerous.
In a lengthy statement on the company’s website, Corynne McSherry and Marcia Hofmann show that, should Sony’s case prove successful, the verdict could set a difficult precedent for legitimate hardware security research.
“For years, EFF has been warning that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be used to chill speech, particularly security research, because legitimate researchers will be afraid to publish their results lest they be accused of circumventing a technological protection measure. We’ve also been concerned that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be abused to try to make alleged contract violations into crimes.
“We’ve never been sorrier to be right. These two things are precisely what’s happening in Sony v. Hotz.”
The writers cite Sony’s claims of the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act in the litigation filing.
“The basic gist of Sony’s argument is that the researchers accessed their own PlayStation 3 consoles in a way that violated the agreement that Sony imposes on users of its network (and supposedly enabled others to do the same). But the researchers don’t seem to have used Sony’s network in their research — they just used the consoles they bought with their own money. Simply put, Sony claims that it’s illegal for users to access their own computers in a way that Sony doesn’t like. Moreover, because the CFAA has criminal as well as civil penalties, Sony is actually saying that it’s a crime for users to access their own computers in a way that Sony doesn’t like.
“That means Sony is sending another dangerous message: that it has rights in the computer it sells you even after you buy it, and therefore can decide whether your tinkering with that computer is legal or not. We disagree. Once you buy a computer, it’s yours. It shouldn’t be a crime for you to access your own computer, regardless of whether Sony or any other company likes what you’re doing.”
Of course, the commentary is blithely – even conveniently – indifferent to the reality that, otherwise innocuous enthusiast mucking about aside, the PS3’s compromised security has opened the platform to piracy.
Loading ...
