Valve to Steam users: no class-action suits

[johnki]

Sony's lawsuits about the hacking of the PS3 were basically copyright lawsuits though. GeoHot and the rest of the hackers were using, modifying, and distributing Sony's code in a way that wasn't permitted by the license. As much as I disagree with the current state of copyright law, I have to grudgingly give Sony a pass on that particular case. It was one of those "legally right, morally wrong" things. If GeoHot et al had fully written their own custom firmware for the PS3, completely from scratch, and Sony managed to win, then I'd be much more outraged. But that wasn't the case. As the case actually was, it was more along the lines of a case where someone released a GPL-derivative product under a non-GPL license. The people involved were given the right to use the code under a certain set of circumstances, and by violating those circumstances they lost their right to use the software. The Free Software Foundation uses similar arguments all the time in enforcing the GPL on companies that modify GPL-licensed software but then don't release the source code.

And here I've been using that as my major "how not to do business" cases. See, to my understanding, all that happened is one kid reverse-engineered something to find out a single code, which unlocked something or other, and then never was able to actually distribute any more than info on how he did it because Sony sued/cease-and-desisted him before he could. Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with a "how I did it" because it assumes that so many consumers are actually going to be willing to go through that crap, and then there's a margin for error from people who just don't know what they're doing, etc. Then there's the fact that someone could be doing exactly what they were, except in secret, who's potentially at a much more dangerous stage, that isn't getting sued.

Either way, thanks for clearing that up.

That said, I think that any software distributed with the hardware should be fair game, if only because it's on the hardware. You can't modify the hardware without inversely affecting the software in some manner, be it performance, or some other manner. The way it works now is rather stupid.