If you decided to donate money to George Hotz (GeoHot) and went through with it in the last couple of years, you may want to take note. A judge has granted Sony the right to subpoena Hotz's PayPal records dating all the way back to January 1st, 2009.
George Hotz has been in an ongoing legal battle with Sony over what the company considers a breach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; Hotz posted root keys on his website that allowed others to jailbreak their PlayStation 3 systems and run homebrew applications along with pirated ones. This will be the fifth subpoena Sony has been authorized. Neowin last reported that a judge had allowed Sony access to the IP addresses of anyone who visited Hotz's website, the IPs of anyone who watched the PS3 jailbreak video connected to his YouTube account, access to his Blogger account, and access to his Twitter account.
That same judge, Joseph Spero, ruled that Sony was allowed to acquire "documents [sufficient to] identify the source of funds (.pdf) in California that went into any PayPal account associated with geohot@gmail.com for the period of January 1, 2009, to February 1, 2011," according to Wired.
Sony has been collecting information that would allow them to decide where they should try Hotz—either in his home state of New Jersey or in San Francisco, which the company would prefer. Sony is hoping that the logs prove many donations came from Northern California, making San Francisco a suitable location for the case, just like the IP addresses they were granted to collect only two weeks ago.
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