@colt_a It seems you've made up your mind. What happened to innocent before proven guilty? You've not seen the evidence, you don't know how a court will interpret negligence. You've condemned them based on your interpretation of a few news articles instead of waiting for a decision based on all of the facts and evidence.

Whether or not Sony was negligent in matters of security is not for you to decide, but for the courts and justice system.

@colt_a Aggravated assault is usually a stronger penalty because it usually implies use of a deadly weapon. But you're right that it would be aggravated assault because any half-decent lawyer would argue that a professional fighters fists are deadly weapons. I hardly think they aggravated the hacker community besides no longer catering to them with the OtherOS feature. The only (first) thing they did was remove the OtherOS feature which got them all upset and led them down the road to all of this. Sony is a business whose responsibility is to provide profit to it's investors. The OtherOS feature was used by a very small minority of people, and probably wasn't didn't have a very high cost-benefit ratio to fix possible vulnerabilities. So while they may not like it that Sony is no longer catering to their Niche crowd, it's not Sony's fault.

Does every company not manipulate it's messages for maximum effect? If some company does not, then I say they're not doing all they can in the eyes of the investors and those responsible should be fired. It's my belief, in our supposedly "Free-market" economy that it rests on the consumer to have enough intelligence to understand the influencing factors in anything a company publishes. Whether it's Sony with their PR-redeeming letters or McDonalds with their class/race specific ads; Targeting white-collared/mostly white people for coffee commercials, or blue-collared/black people for general commercials. (usually with a "hip" black narrator too.)