Sony has taken a lot of flak from customers over the PlayStation Network outage. While I’m not a fan of them, I am sympathetic to their plight.
Kristopher Johns through the Rothken law firm filed a class-action lawsuit against the American branch of Sony Computer Entertainment along with Sony Entertainment International, LLC. The suit seeks compensation over “breach of warranty, negligent data security, violations of consumers’ rights of privacy, failure to protect those rights, and failure and on-going refusal to timely inform consumers of unauthorized third-party access to their credit card account and other nonpublic and private financial information.”
The filing states:
…consumers and merchants have been exposed to what is one of the largest compromise of Internet security and the greatest potential for credit card fraud to ever occur in United States history.
With upwards of 77 million users, that’s a little more than one-quarter of the United States’ 300 million citizens.
The filing goes on to say that Sony was aware of the potential for security breach for a substantial period of time and did nothing to warn customers, did nothing to warn customers about the risks in purchasing and relying upon Sony’s faulty security.
The suit seeks actual and compensatory damages and restitution along with the replacement or recall of all defective PlayStation 3 consoles, which is to say every PS3. A total amount is not defined, due to the fact that it’s impossible to tell how many PlayStation 3 owners are out there, and how many of them have actually been affected. The filing does say that it will be in excess of five million dollars.
We’ll be keeping our eye on this as the suit develops. It will definitely be interesting to see how this turns out.
[Sources: G4TV, Kristopher Johns v. Sony via Rothken Law Firm]
