“Spanish gamer site NicaGamerz.com have reported that it’s now legal to sell the PS3 Jailbreak modchip in Spain. According to the article, one reason for the legal ruling is because Sony removed the ability to run GNU/Linux on the console.
One can only wonder if Sony will soon rush out a firmware update that will re-enable the OtherOS feature, and appeal the court decision. Oh the irony of that thought. The legal ruling was made on the 13th December. There are only 5 days to appeal, starting from that date.”
Worse for Sony is that it now has to pay all the associated legal costs of the retailers it targeted for selling Jailbreak devices up until this ruling. Terribly constructed sentence, yes, but the point is that Sony now has to pay other folks’ legal bills. That’s not fun.
Game makers and console creators, like Sony, are reluctant to allow consumers to jailbreak their devices out of fear of piracy, but jailbreak does give consumers other options as well not natively allowed by the console box, such as the ability to back up and play backed up games. Sony has two days left to appeal the decision of the Spanish court.
Unfortunately for Sony, the way that court No 8 Mercantil de Barcelona sees the issue is that the corporation originally sold the PS3 with the ability to install an operating system that would support homebrew software. This, combined with the decision that one should have the ability to enter and alter the “guts” of a system they’ve bought and paid for, influenced the court to not only rule that the PS Jailbreak will be legal to sell and use, but also that Sony must pay damages to the stores that had their product seized and sales undermined for months while the case was in legal limbo.
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