A U.S. judge has authorized Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) to access the Paypal records of the PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, seeking for any funds went into Hotz's accounts for the period January 1 2009 to February 1, 2011. According to this document, SCEA is authorized to serve Paypal Inc with a subpoena seeking information and documents sufficient to identify the source of funds in California than went into any Paypal account associated with geohot@gmail.com (Hotz's email address), for the period January 1 2009 to February 1, 2011.

There is a jurisdictional argument over whether Sony must sue Hotz in his home state of New Jersey rather than in San Francisco. Sony is seeking whether Hotz has accepted monetary donations for the hack from people residing in Northern California. In that case, the litigation could be tranfered in San Francisco.

The latest order comes two weeks after Magistrate Joseph Spero in San Francisco granted Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who had visited Hotz's website from January of 2009.


Sony accuses George Hotz of breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws after he published an encryption key and software tools on his website that allow PlayStation owners to gain complete control of their consoles and possibly allow then to run pirated copies of games.