Do you really think the airing employees private info was legitimatized by Sony's bad karma? For something most of the employees likely had nothing to do with?
It is relatively simple to take the argument about responsibility to Nuremburg at the level of fidelity an internet argument requires.
Lets say that after Nuremburg, we are not willing to completely absolve low-level players because we realize after the Holocaust that widespread complicity is the only way such an atrocity can happen.
All the same, we aren't assigning the same level of responsibility to the prison guard that we do to Goebbels, etc. We will apply it proportionately.
If you take the Sony crimes and relate them to the Holocaust -- for nihilistic internet argument purposes -- you end up with some small fraction.
Following the Nuremberg methodology, you take that small fraction and apply it 100% to decisionmakers and proportionately to low-level players. The resulting blame is small enough relative to their breach of privacy that the cyber attackers are in the wrong.
Therefore, taking this argument back to Nuremberg does not serve the purpose of justifying the middle managers/analysts breaches of privacy.
No, in Nuremberg the war was over. The enemy had been defeated. It was time to move on. But people were being prosecuted (and still are) as a spectator sport.
Sony on the other had is a fully functioning company that is by far not defeated. Each employee needs to take fully responsibility for the company they work for.
Sony is a pretty terrible company. That doesn't mean that their rank-and-file employees deserve what happened, but you don't have to search very far to come to the realization that the Sony conglomerate is one of the most anti-consumer organizations in the business world.
That's... Wow. Specially the one about the preinstalled rootkit. My present batch of gizmos (Laptop, smartphone, e-reader...) were all Sony becouse all seemed the best I could buy at the moment of the purchase. I will seriously consider buying anything at all from them the next time.