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The Sony PS3 Class File An Amended Complaint

By Pamela Jones et al.

The class action plaintiffs in In Re SONY PS3 "Other OS" Litigation have filed their Amended Complaint [PDF] that they hope will fully address the deficiencies that the judge found in the original filing, and it's dynamite.

The Amended Complaint claims that Sony Computer Entertainment America didn't remove OtherOS functionality due to security concerns. It had other options, if security had been the real issue. It was done, they claim, for financial reasons, and that Sony's justification for the removal of Linux functionality was "false", chosen so Sony could rely on the wording of various terms. They also point a finger at IBM, claiming that possibly IBM was not happy about the military using PS3s for clustering, instead of buying IBM Blades servers:

159. SCEA suggested initially that the removal of the "Other OS" function from the "fat" models in April 2010 was for security and intellectual property reasons.

160. On its website, SCEA wrote: Why did you delete the "Other OS" feature?

A. To protect the intellectual property of the content offered on the PS3 system as well as to provide a more secure system for those users who are enjoying games and other entertainment content on the PS3 system, we have decided to delete the feature to address security vulnerabilities of the system.

161. This statement is a fabrication. SCEA gave these reasons as a pretext so that it could attempt to argue that the Warranty, SSLA, and/or TOS allowed for the removal of the "Other OS" feature. In reality, SCEI and SCEA removed this feature because it was expensive to maintain (as they previously admitted when the feature was removed from the "slim" models - but which they conveniently removed from SCEA's website); they were losing money on every PS3 unit sold (due to poor decisions in the planning and design of the Cell chip as noted above and given the PS3's extra features); SCEA needed to promote and sell games to make their money back on the loss-leading PS3 consoles (and there was no profit in users utilizing the computer functions of the PS3); and IBM wanted to sell its expensive servers utilizing the Cell processor (users could cluster PS3s for the same purposes much less expensively).

Wow. If you were George Hotz's lawyers, your ears would be perking up right about now, methinks. We don't know yet how the judge will rule on this amended complaint, but if they are allowed to go forward and can prove these allegations, I don't see how this could not affect the SCEA v. Hotz litigation.

Full post as published by Groklaw on March 10, 2011 (boomark / email).