Hacker News Reader

Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

That was just one example of a case (I just picked it because it's close enough to Hacker News that most people here probably remember it), and notice that Sony got everything they asked for before the case was settled, including some incredibly unfair things (like the list of people who had legally downloaded the legally-created software of Hotz). The reason it was settled out of court was seemingly just so Hotz could avoid a felony.

There are plenty of other Sony cases that demonstrate the rule.

View on HN

People go on telling everybody about "legal" cracks because their lives are not affected.

If it meant hackers stole everything you own and worked for in your life so far you would think twice how legal this is.

A jailbreak isn't a crack, and the idea that it's a crack is ludicrous. iOS has had hundreds of jailbreaks. There's no financial incentive: it's just freeing a system.

Further, the idea that software piracy is stealing is also absurd, for an entirely different reason: copying is not stealing. Sony still had the original copies.

Beyond that: I already do release all of my source code under libre licenses. Copying isn't stealing, and I've lived my life as a testament to that.

iOS Jailbreaks are immensely valuable because they let you access the user’s data, hence why they’re literally sold for millions these days.

Stealing is taking someone else's property without due permission. That applies to intellectual property, it doesn't have to be physical.

Now you can use the stupid libertarian argument that you're just "moving bits around" or "moving numbers around" (and math is not illegal). But do that do much and you'll find that society's answer is to move particles of lead in your general direction, at high velocity.

I'm not a libertarian at all, actually. Intellectual property is a reasonable idea, but it only makes sense when forced upon producers instead of consumers, and a lot of what people deem as intellectual property is in reality something that should have patents on it. Patents expire, copyright doesn't meaningfully.

Stealing is taking someone else's property without permission, as you said. However, copying doesn't take it away from them, and jailbreaking literally doesn't do anything but apply a patch to your existing bits. That's the farthest thing from stealing you could imagine, and your argument falls apart with just the tiniest bit of poking.

>Sony got everything they asked for before the case was settled

Not much happened before the settlement, the parties settled very quickly after Hotz's motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction failed. The TRO sucked, but wasn't particularly unreasonable.

>incredibly unfair things (like the list of people who had legally downloaded the legally-created software of Hotz).

Jurisdictional discovery is not incredibly unfair, and was only a natural consequence of Hotz's motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction.

>The reason it was settled out of court was seemingly just so Hotz could avoid a felony.

The fuck? This was a civil case.

The fuck? This was a civil case.

Computer fraud is a felony, and around that time the DoJ was getting very trigger-happy in turning civil cases criminal. Google the CFAA, which they were trying to pin Hotz under.

> DoJ was getting very trigger-happy in turning civil cases criminal

Do you happen to have a single example of this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

I don't think there was ever a civil suit filed against Swartz. As far as I remember and according to the timeline on wikipedia this seems to have been a criminal case from the very beginning.

And in any case I don't think this is a great example of the DOJ being trigger-happy, what Swartz did was obviously criminal and they were still willing to let him off with only a slap on the wrist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com