Originally posted by another user
• On January 12, 2011, Sony sued Hotz and others on 8 claims, including violation of the DMCA, computer fraud, and copyright infringement.
In response, Carnegie Mellon University professor David S. Touretzky mirrored Hotz’s writings and issued a statement supporting that Hotz’s publication is within his right to free speech.
• On January 27, 2011, Sony’s request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) is granted by the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
This forbids him from distributing the jailbreak, helping or encouraging others to jailbreak, and distributing information they’ve learned during the creation of the jailbreak.
It also orders him to turn over computers and storage media used in the creation of the jailbreak to Sony’s lawyers. Professor Touretzky’s mirror was voluntarily censored following issue of the TRO, but Hotz’s writings and software have been mirrored elsewhere.
• On February 12, 2011, Hotz posted a rap video on his official YouTube page explaining his Sony lawsuit.
• On February 19, 2011, Hotz started a blog about the Sony lawsuit.
Originally posted by another user
He was a finalist at the 2005 ISEF competition in Portland OR with his project “The Mapping Robot”. Recognition included interviews on the Today Show and Larry King.
Hotz was a finalist at the 2005 ISEF competition, with his project “The Googler”.
Continuing with robots, Hotz competed in his school’s highly successful Titanium Knights battlebots team. George also worked on his project, “Neuropilot,” in which he was able to read EEG signals off his head with hardware from the OpenEEG project.
Hotz competed in the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a science competition for high school students, where his project, entitled “I want a Holodeck”, received awards and prizes in several categories.
Hotz has received considerable attention in mainstream media, including interviews on the Today Show, Fox, CNN, NBC, CBS, G4, ABC CNBC, and articles in several magazines, newspapers, and websites, including Forbes, and BBC.
The Forbes article said Hotz hopes to go into Neuroscience: “hacking the brain,” he called it. In March 2008, PC World magazine listed George as one of the top 10 Overachievers under 21.
He entered the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2007, quickly after gaining notoriety for hacking the iPhone, but withdrew from the school after 1 quarter.
In December 2007, Hotz travelled to Sweden to attend the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar and talk about his 3D imaging invention (called Project Holodeck) that netted him a $20,000 Intel scholarship earlier that year.
Originally posted by another user
In the 1970s, Sony developed Betamax, a video tape recording format (VHS would later overtake Betamax).
Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Company were among the film industry members who were wary of this development, but were also aware that the U.S. Congress was in the final stages of a major revision of U.S. copyright law, and would likely be hesitant to undertake any new protections for the film industry.
The companies therefore opted to sue Sony and its distributors in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in 1976, alleging that because Sony was manufacturing a device that could potentially be used for copyright infringement, they were thus liable for any infringement that was committed by its purchasers.
The complaint additionally included an unfair competition claim under the Lanham Act, but this was dismissed early in the course of the lawsuit.
Two years later, the District Court ruled for Sony, on the basis that noncommercial home use recording was considered fair use, that access to free public information is a First Amendment public interest served by this use.
Originally posted by another user
Mr. von Hippel, who has been researching innovation for 30 years, estimates that when it comes to scientific instruments 77 percent of the innovations come from users.
Fields like medicine can be particularly fertile for creative tinkering. A classic example of user innovation is the heart-lung machine.
In the late 1930s Dr. John Heysham Gibbon approached manufacturers about building one, but they did not know how to do it or whether there was a market for it.
So Dr. Gibbon spent years developing one himself before this essential device was manufactured commercially.