I think some people are not getting it.
Let me explain:
To hurt a major company like Sony you can either due one of two things, or perhaps both. You can go after it's physical assets and resources, or you can go after it's money and abillity to make money. Generally speaking there is no way to do the latter that isn't going to affect consumers, since the bottom line is to prevent the target company from getting their money, which measn denying them the abillity to spend their money and give it to the company in question even if they want to.
I think this is over a bit more than just GeoHotz, which is why their settlement with him didn't end it. This is over the same issue GeoHotz was involved in though, which had to do with sony taking away a feature from their consoles that they had paid for. Sony's invocation of their "TOS Agreement" and how it should be binding even if money changed hands before it was visible (and all kinds of other arguements) has also made that an issue, because at the
heart of the arguement is Sony argueing that you do not own the property you paid for, and they can do whatever they want to it, at any time, without you having any say in the matter.
The point here is to kind of get Sony to lose enough money where it's either forced off the Internet and loses access to that revenue stream permanantly, or make it apologize, return the other OS option, and concede that people do indeed own their property and that they relinquish any claim to the right to remove features.
See, it's one of those cases where while Sony might have been acting to save money by fighting piracy, like most attempts to do this, they stepped wll over the lines of acceptable content by hurting millions of legitimate users for their own personal financial gain. The pirates might have been stealing from them, but they were stealing from you. Sony went further than even the worst DRM to date.
As a result, it's one of those things where I really can't agree with the hackers, and yes I find not being able to fully use my PS-3 annoying, but at the same time I can't agree with Sony either. Personally I would have much rather seen the goverment do something, but it wasn't going to, or for them to lose in the civil court system, but with them holding all of the legal cards by employing all the experts in the relevent areas of law at least to the point of causing a conflict of interst... that just wasn't going to happen either. The civil court system has long since ceased to be a valid way of the average person to get justice from exploitive corperations. The average guy just can't afford it when you don't consider other cocnerns as well.
I'm one of those who pretty much takes a "sit back and watch the show" approach to the whole sordid affair.
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As far as the comments about this kind of thing being declared terrorism, beyond any concerns over this issue, that is the last thing we need. I've seen this before, and most recently when looking at the Twitter response.
See, I am a general supporter of The Patriot Act and Homeland Security, but I believe that one of the biggest dangers has always been on keeping this focused on foreign and cultural terrorism. We're already seeing it slip far more into the domestic sector than it should be, and being used for things that are well out of context to an attack on our goverment or society by a foreign nation, or a specific identifiable culture. Using anti-terrorism laws and manpower in service of a business interest is a very, very, bad idea, that isn't what things like this were intended for. If we continue down this path any crime on a large scale or affecting a large group of people will be labeled terrorism, and that's not a good thing. Right now the hackers have not done anything but attack a private business, so as a result acting as if it's a terrorist attack is irrelevent. What's more there is a huge differant between "OMG, I can't buy DLC for my video games" and someone blowing you up. As time goes on and people are increasingly tempted to use anti-terrorism laws for matters like this, we're bringing a lot of trouble upon ourselves. The last thing we need is for private businesses to expect federal goverment mobilization when they start losing money.
I'll also point out that for those screaming the inhumanity of this whole thing, understand that this is petty compared to if someone had decided to go after Sony's assets and decided to say blow up a couple of their corperate campuses with Mcveigh specials (Fertilizer bombs). In such a case we'd have reason to be considerably more upset than what we're seeing here. Really all Sony has to do to end this in all likelyhood is to say they are sorry, and concede people's control over their own property which is far from being some horrible thing.
