Sony & Geohot Settle Their Lawsuit

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The legal battle between Sony Computer Entertainment-America (SCEA) and George “Geohot” Hotz, the famed iPhone/PlayStation hacker, has been settled out of court. Sony announced the news via a press release and a posting on the Official PlayStation blog. Terms of the deal weren’t given, aside from the news that Geohot has agreed to a permanent injunction against sharing information about circumventing PS3 security.

Geohot first rose to internet prominence in 2007 when he was the first man to jailbreak the iPhone. He drew the ire of Sony’s attention when he was the first person to gain hypervisor-level access to some of the low-level operations of the PlayStation 3. This hack led to Sony disabling the OpenOS feature of older PlayStation 3s. After that, the doors blew off the hacker community, and soon, a full on “jailbreak” for the PlayStation 3 was released.

Even though some loyal Sony gamers blamed Geohot for a few weeks of commonplace hacking that took place in the PS3 online gaming scene after the jailbreaks were out, I think you have to consider Sony to have been the PR bad guy in this whole mess. They subpoenaed the IP addresses of everybody who accessed Geohot’s website, as well as people who interacted with Geohot’s Twitter and YouTube accounts. These controversial moves from Sony drew the attention of online hacktivist group Anonymous, who has declared war on Sony.

They recently brought down PlayStation websites and the PlayStation Network. In the press statement, Sony acknowledged the Anonymous attacks for the first time (and we’ve been keeping track, I’ve been trying to get a comment from their press relations team about the attacks), going out of their way to note that Geohot was not involved in the denial-of-service attacks on PSN and the websites.

In the statement from Sony, Geohot says:

It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier. I’m happy to have the litigation behind me.

What do you think about this? Sony has silenced Geohot, but who was the winner?