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Sony Threatens PS3 Hackers With Legal Action

Posted by Zonk on from the tempting-targets dept.

Eurogamer reports that Sony is going after users sidestepping the PlayStation 3's protection software. Firmware 1.10 and 1.11 have both been cracked, and as a result illegal game copies can be booted from the console. "Booting games and playing them are two different things, however; so far, hackers have not been able to get any of the copied games to run, nor have they been able to run homebrew software. Every hardware launch brings with it a race for hackers to defeat the system's protections, whether for the technological challenge, to run copied software, or to allow for homebrew games. Despite Sony's attempts to prevent its emergence, the PSP has a strong homebrew community - and hackers are doubtless hoping to establish a similar base for PS3."

4 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory by TheJerg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You can't stop them anyway. So why bother trying. Etc, etc.

    1. Re:Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Why can't they be like Nintendo on this. There have been several updates to the DS (especially the lite) and as far as I know they haven't tried to limit the homebrew community.

  2. Re:Region games by Panzergheist · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yes, it is still true that PS3 games have no region encoding. The PS3 will honor the region encoding of DVDs, PS2 and PS1 games, and Blu-Ray movies. But no, there is no region encoding for PS3 games.

    I really don't see a legitimate reason for trying to hack the PS3. If you want home brew apps, install Linux on it. If you want that game from Japan that you can't get in your own country, buy it and place the disk in the drive. Apart from hacking it just for bragging rights, or to play pirated games, there really isn't a good excuse to bypass the protections on the PS3.

  3. 17 USC 602 by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Even just buying an original DVD from Japan to play on your imported PS2 counts as piracy for Sony, or at least they'll try to handwave it as such. See Title 17, United States Code, section 602, which bans importing more than one copy of a game. This means that imported handheld games and those imported console games that lack split-screen mode have no multiplayer.

    The excuse on movie DVDs was that it eats into theatre ticket sales: someone who bought the US DVD early has often seen the movie that way before it even gets into the theatres. And because some movies are based on underlying works, and copyrights on these underlying works expire at different times in different countries. For instance, Peter and Wendy and other pre-1923 works in the Peter Pan universe are public domain in the United States, but they are copyrighted in the European Union until the end of this year, and they are copyrighted in the United Kingdom until Great Ormond Street Hospital goes out of business. In this case, region 2 DVDs would be subject to a royalty payable to GOSH, but region 2 DVDs would not.

    OK, I can even live with that mercantile reason. But that just simply doesn't apply to games. There simply is no big-screen theatre version of, say, Gran Turismo. At one time, the video game industry's counterpart to theatrical release was arcade release. In the case of Street Fighter II and its clones, this was true for a long time.

    Sony got my money fair and square there.

    But Sony Computer Entertainment America stole your money from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

    Still, PSP and PS3 are largely region-free for gaming.