Ah, c’mon, Sony, don’t look so surprised. Sure, you issued a sincere, heartfelt apology to the masses after you removed the OtherOS feature citing “security concerns”, and probably gave yourself a congratulatory pat on the back for handling the situation so well, but you didn’t honestly think it would all go away, did you? The small number (Sony’s words, not ours) of users affected by the change in system functionality who ultimately filed a combined total of seven class-action suits after voicing their outrage are still here, only now the courts have conveniently bundled them all up into a nice, little, more manageable single class-action.
This news comes courtesy of the fine folks over at Ars Technica, who obtained a document detailing the request from all of the attorneys involved, stating:
“In essence, the claims in these cases are that Sony Computer Entertainment of America (“Sony”) falsely represented that PS3 purchasers would be able to use their PS3s as a computer by installing another operating system, such as Linux, in a recent firmware update, Sony removed the ability of consumers to utilize this feature. As a result, seven class actions were filed against Sony in federal court in San Francisco, California.”
If the courts rule in favor of the class, presumably those who purchased a PS3 between November 17, 2006 and March 27, 2010 will be eligible for some type of compensation, albeit nothing to quit your day job over. Still, if anybody deserves to get something out of this, it’s definitely the USAF. Without a cluster of Linux compatible PS3’s, how else do you suppose they crunch numbers on such a tight budget?
