Judge gives Sony access to PS3 hacker's PayPal records

I find it odd that Sony is allowed to infringe on the privacy rights of thousands of innocent people all to help them prove something that it is their duty to do in the first place. None of these individuals are even being notified that this is even happening, so even if they would spend the effort and money to fight it they have no chance to.<p>Frankly, this issue really shows how bizarre our adversarial system is. Sony must establish jurisdiction to the court, but they cannot. The court then orders unrelated service providers to disclose information about further unrelated persons to Sony. Sony then takes that information and uses it to try and prove what they are required to to the court (and also get the added value of learning the identities of a lot of consumers they presumably hate).<p>If Sony is allowed to make the court do its work for them, why do they even get to have the information disclosed to them? The court is the one that is going to decide on the evidence anyways, so why don't they (or a third-party appointed by the court) just look at it and decide?<p>I'm also reminded of cases where people have tried to request the source code of devices (voting machines and radar guns) to audit them. They could not even get it supplied to an independent third-party because of corporate privacy.

&#62; The information sought is part of a jurisdictional argument over whether Sony must sue Hotz in his home state of New Jersey rather than in San Francisco, where Sony would prefer.<p>He also accepted funds from France (hello!), but somehow I doubt they'd try him here. Is Sony actually allowed to do this? (This is not -completely- a troll, I don't know US law and I'd be interested to know.)

I don't think this case is getting enough attention outside of places like HN and Ars. The way this man's rights are being stripped bare is a very impressive display of fascism that needs to be seen in a public light.

I'd like to hear a lawyer's perspective on how the modern legal climate would have applied to historical events, especially Compaq's reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS which enabled them to create PC clones.

I feel more and more that Stallman has a point. Everything that's in the cloud is there for the taking. Not to sound like a luddite but if he'd have cashed checks instead of paypal or hosted his own website this wouldn't be possible, right?<p>I remember Rob Gonggrijp's comment when his Twitter logs were subpoena'd: "This is why people run their own mail servers".

Does people only get the data who donated, or also how much?In the latter case, Sony now has a strategic asymmetric advantage: it can estimate how much money Geohot has for his defense, and then drag out the process so long until he has no money left.<p>I'm very surprised the Judge sided with Sony on this one.

I wish Sony would use these legal costs to hire some decent designers.