California Man Faces Lawsuit for Selling Jailbroken Sony PS4 Consoles

• Sony filed a lawsuit against an online seller who was selling jailbroken PS4s with pirated games.
• The California man is now facing charges of copyright infringement.
• The seller was offering 60 pirated games with the jailbroken consoles on eBay.

A California man who was selling jailbroken Sony PS4 consoles with 60 bundled games on eBay is now facing legal action for copyright infringement and breaching security measures that are implemented on the manufacturer’s hardware. Defendant Eric Scales who was selling the consoles using his account name “Blackcloak13” actively encouraged people on eBay to not buy games according to Sony.

Image Courtesy of TorrentFreak

Sony managed to keep its PlayStation 4 console free from piracy since its initial launch in 2013. However, the piracy community became highly active with jailbreaks being developed since 2017. While the manufacturer actively patched all available jailbreaks as soon as they were discovered, there are countless consoles that are on older firmware which can be jailbroken. Sellers all over the world jailbreak these consoles and sell them bundled with pirated games. This is the first time the Japanese manufacturer has acted against the jailbreaking community, and it seems like Sony wants to set an example to deter jailbreaking.

The complaint by Sony reads “Defendant is an individual who has marketed, sold, and distributed ‘jailbroken’ PS4 consoles that: (a) contain ‘pirated’ (unauthorized) copies of PS4-compatible video games, and (b) were produced and designed for purposes of, and/or were marketed by Defendant for use in, circumventing technological protection measures.”

To verify that the devices were jailbroken, Sony acquired two devices from the seller which served as evidence. Outside of selling jailbroken PS4s on eBay, Scales was also running a website offering jailbreaking and modding services along with his hardware sales. Sony is currently trying to obtain a court injunction to stop all infringing activity and destroy all of the modded consoles, games and hard drives. The Japanese company will also be attempting to extract damages for copyright infringement and violation of DMCA through jailbreaking.

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