Sony told Spero, a San Francisco magistrate, that it needed the information for at least two reasons.
One is to prove the “defendant’s distribution†of the hack. The other involves a jurisdictional argument over whether Sony must sue Hotz in his home state of New Jersey rather than in San Francisco, which Sony would prefer. Sony said the server logs would demonstrate that many of those who downloaded Hotz’s hack reside in Northern California — thus making San Francisco a proper venue for the case.