[citation][nom]union6[/nom]Please correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't there just a law passed or a ruling that stated that you can hack you own stuff?[/citation]
You are correct union6, Congress and the copyright office just recently made a decision stating that iPhone users are free to modify their phones at will with impunity. While a company may create barriers preventing the easy unlocking of their devices, it is not unlawful for users to bypass or circumvent these measures. Nor is it illegal to run software on these devices for which it was not intended.
Every three years Congress will consider making exceptions to the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to protect the intellectual property of companies. Here's a quote:
" The act forbids circumventing encryption technology to copy or modify copyrighted works."
Anyway, two years ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation requested that jailbreaking iPhones be added to the list of exemptions to the DMCA. These exemptions to the law are called "Anti-Circumvention Provisions" for the purpose of protecting specific technologies like encryption used in credit cards, ATMs, etc.
This past year, Congess finally ruled that it would NOT add jailbreaking to the list of exemptions and that users can pretty much do as they damn well please with their own gadgets.... voila, legal jailbreaking for all.
Here's a link to the full article about the recent DMCA changes:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/
So you may ask wtf am I talking about iPhones so much when this is a Sony and Playstation 3 matter. The point I want to make is that the decision on jailbreaking set a precedent for similar cases to follow. I find it hard to imagine anyone being prosecuted successfully for doing something so similar to what Congress just ruled was totally legal.
Hacking DVD or Blu-Ray disc encryption, releasing the encryption schemes of credit card companies, and divulging or distributing copyrighted intellectual property (piracy) are the kinds of things that are forbidden by the DMCA. I feel that it's been made clear (except to SONY!), that in the US, consumers can damn well do what they want to their own hardware. The open source and homebrew scenes are quite often sources of great innovation. Lumping them in with pirates and dismissing them all as criminals is ignorant and foolish.
Yes, I do take this personally as an avid fan and contributor to the homebrew and console modding scene. I own a hacked Xbox (1), Wii, PS3, and an Xbox 360 and have purchased all the games I own for each console. Making legal backups of your own games and adding functionality to these consoles which many owners revered so highly when they were released seems like an obvious consumer right. Blindly pursuing a closed business model like Apple tried to do with the iPhone WILL NOT WORK in this day and age and I will gladly watch any company fail that tries to do so.