Just as a PS3 hack was inevitable, so is the legal block that Sony was bound to impose sooner or later.

In this case, the action was sooner as before PSJailbreak started shipping, Sony Computer Entertainment Australia was granted a temporary injunction by the nation’s Federal Court to block the importation and sale of the new PS3 modchips.

So until August 31, none of the modchip retailers in Australian territory will be able to import and distribute the much awaited device.

The court order is as follows:

[The court] orders that up to and including 31 August 2010, the First to Fourth Respondents and each of them, whether by themselves, their servants or agents, be restrained from doing any of the following acts with respect to all and any Universal Serial Bus devices described as “PSJailbreak” […]:

(a) importing them into Australia with the intention of providing them to another person;
(b) distributing them to another person;
(c) offering them to the public;
(d) providing them to another person; and/or
(e) otherwise dealing in them.

Till the deadline, expect Sony to have a more aggressive stance in convincing the courts in making the injunction permanent.

It’s an interesting development since Sony is using legal grounds to block the sale of the modchip similar to what Nintendo achieved by being able to successfully in ban the sale of R4 (not the R4i for the DSi :)) in several parts of the world.

If this legal blockade somehow fails, I think it’s safe to assume that Sony will be pushing a new firmware that will disable the hack that allows users to play downloaded games.  How exactly?  Well, aside from blocking sale, importation and distribution of the said device, the court has also order the makers (which is an Australian based company) to deliver technical samples of the device to Sony for analysis as part of the case.

If the company behind PSJailbreak pushes through with providing them copies, there’s little doubt Sony will be able to counter these before that deadline is up.. or at least before sales and pre-orders start shipping.

At this point however, it is still unknown what the hack actually does. It does not rely on the OtherOS feature as it was since removed by Sony since the Geohotz incident and some in the community suspect something similar to a Pandora Battery for the PS3, allowing the console to be booted into debug mode and allow unsigned code to run.. but until proven, that’s just speculation. If Sony had it’s way, we’ll probably never know.