Sony Wins Subpoena of GeoHot's Paypal, YouTube, Twitter Over PS3 Hacking

From DailyTech: Sony's harassment of the infamous young iPhone hacker George "GeoHot" Hotz continues in the wake of his posting root keys to the Sony Playstation 3 via an Android Phone hacking process. The hack, which gets around the PS3 scheme for verifying "authentic" apps, was authored by GeoHot and his German friends at fail0verflow, who developed the initial portion of the hack.

In Californian federal court in San Francisco, a federal magistrate, Joseph Spero, gave Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) the right to subpoena the paypal records of GeoHot. Writes [PDF] the magistrate "documents sufficient to identify the source of funds in California that went into any PayPal account associated with geohot@gmail.com for the period of January 1, 2009, to February 1, 2011."

Ostensibly the subpoena is to determine whether GeoHot received donations for the hack from people in California for the hack as Sony claims.

SCEA wants to sue GeoHot in San Francisco, near its home base. By contrast GeoHot is trying to force the company to sue him in New Jersey -- his home state. Donations for the hack could determine which region has jurisdiction. SCEA is claiming people in northern California sent GeoHot donations, so the case would be under the local San Francisco court's jurisdiction.

GeoHot says, however, that he received no donations for the hack, which only went one day live before Sony aired its lawsuit.

If GeoHot has any secrets they will surely be exposed, given the permissiveness of the federal court system. They have thus far had Sony access to the Twitter; YouTube and Google; and the IP addresses of visitors to his website.

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