Federal Magistrate Joseph Spero, on May 3, granted Sony the right to subpoena Hotz' site host in order to acquire the IP addresses of anyone who has visited his website from January of 2009 to the present. This would include, naturally, anyone who might have visited his site simply out of curiousity after the story around the PS3 jailbreak, which Hotz (AKA Geohot) provided.
In addition to allowing Sony to subpoena Bluehost, Hotz' site host (http://www.geohot.com), Sony will also be able to subpoena Twitter, Google, and YouTube for any IP addresses and records in this case, which revolves around a jailbreak for the PlayStation 3 video game system. The jailbreak, just as an iPhone jailbreak does, allows users to perform acts they cannot normally, including playing pirated games.
Hotz, AKA geohot, is well-known for his prior iPhone jailbreaks. He has been charged with a violation of the DMCA in the case.
The Google subpoena seeks the logs for Hotz’s Blogger.com blog. The YouTube subpoena seeks information connected to the “geohot” YouTube account that posted a video of the PS3 hack in use, dubbed “Jailbroken PS3 3.55 with Homebrew.” The video was later removed. That subpoena demands data to identify those who watched the video and “documents reproducing all records or usernames and IP addresses that have posted or published comments in response to the video.”
Finally, another subpoena is directed at Twitter, and demands information about all of Hotz’s tweets, and “documents sufficient to identify all names, addresses, and telephone numbers associated with the Twitter account.”
Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a letter sent to Magistrate Spero prior to the ruling, asked that Spero deny the request, saying that the subpoenas were “overly broad.”
Indeed, while many visited, watched, etc. because they wanted to view or use the PS3 jailbreak, there are many who may have visited his sites for iPhone jailbreaking information, which was declared legal by the U.S. Copyright Office in 2010.
That includes, for example, us.
Via: Wired
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