As the human race catapults its way through the technological age, new controversies arise with each breakthrough we happen to stumble upon. Some notable disputes: stem cell research, whether or not robots have souls and everyone’s favorite — piracy, or simply “sharing,” depending on your point of view.
Those who have been in the know for a while now may remember the good old days of Napster and Kazaa that fulfilled our musical needs until their untimely demises. Those who have just acquired their eye patches and peg-legs may be more familiar with BitTorrent and the recently deceased Limewire.
More recently, pirating and peer-to-peer sharing is spreading from the computer. “Jailbreaking” iPhones and iPod Touches have become popular; it allows roguish users to download apps they’d normally have to pay for, as well as apps that are not licensed by Apple. The console gaming industry, too, has experienced major changes.
Gamers can now “mod” (or hack) their home consoles. Modding gives players the ability to make characters invincible, impossibly accurate and infinitely strong. Similar to Apple’s jailbreaking situation, there is an entire community dedicated to making “home-brewed” applications for the Wii. These hackers also have the habit of making games free.
The Xbox 360 is in a similar situation, though it’s probably the least affected of the current generation consoles. New to the hacking scene is the PlayStation 3, which was recently jailbroken by George Hotz, a 21-year-old from Jersey, who publicly released the root key for the PS3. This root key allows a user to make the PS3 recognize programs it normally wouldn’t support, including different operating systems and pirated versions of games.
Unfortunately for Sony, the company that makes the PS3, there is not much it can do. If it were to change to a new root key, games from the past four years would cease to work. Since it can’t fight technologically, it’s taking the fight to court.
Sony is going after Hotz and a group of people known as the “failoverflow” team. Hotz has been the center of attention and was forced to forfeit a large amount of evidence mainly because he is the only person Sony is able to identify. The failoverflow team is made up of people with anonymous Internet aliases, so Sony is now subpoenaing the information from popular sites such as Google, Twitter and PayPal.
But Hotz and his colleagues seem to have some legal backing in this case. Last year, the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress ruled that it was perfectly legal for users of handheld devices (think iPhones and Droids) to jailbreak their phones, simply because the supposed hackers owned their devices. Hotz hopes his console case follows the precedent.
As both parties are now waiting for the next phase of the trial, there has obviously been some tension, as well as some embarrassing gaffes. Sony accidentally tweeted the jailbreak code for the PS3 through Kevin Butler — their fictional spokesman on television commercials, similar to say, Flo from Progressive ads — after a Twitter user sent a message to the humorous (and apparently ill-informed) fictitious executive. Whoever was in charge of Butler’s Twitter account published the hacking code under the impression that the sender was initiating a game of Battleship.
Sony should take a lesson from Microsoft in dealing with hairy situations. The company actually rewarded those who jailbroke the Windows Phone 7 with a humorous T-shirt and a free phone. Microsoft then went on to work with these individuals by discussing how they could create a symbiotic relationship where both homebrewers and the corporation are happy.
Sony, like Microsoft, needs to see these people as, well, people — not just wells of money to be tapped.