Court grants Sony's temporary restraining order against Geohot, PS3 jailbreak still available everywhere

It looked for a moment like Geohot and fail0verflow might beat Sony's DMCA lawsuit over the PS3 jailbreak on a jurisdictional technicality, but things didn't go their way: the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted Sony's request for a temporary restraining order forbidding Mr. Hotz and his merry men from distributing or linking to the jailbreak, helping or encouraging others to jailbreak, hacking into the PS3 or PSN, or distributing any information they've found while hacking. What's more, they've been ordered to turn over any computers or storage media used to create the jailbreak to Sony's lawyers -- although we've got a feeling Geohot's attorneys will raise a bit of a fuss about that.

Of course, this doesn't mean that Sony's won anything substantive -- it's just proven to the court that the jailbreak will cause it ongoing harm while the case continues, and it still has to actually win its formal lawsuit to collect any damages or a permanent injunction. And let's not forget that forcing Geohot to stop distributing it won't stop anyone else -- in almost an exact mirror of the deCSS case, we're already seeing the jailbreak mirrored all over the internet. Way to learn from history, Sony.

[Thanks, Henry]

Court grants Sony's temporary restraining order against Geohot, PS3 jailbreak still available everywhere originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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