Apple Pushes New DMCA Charge to Kill Psystar in Court
December 1, 2008
Apple has added new acussation against Macintosh-clone maker Psystar. CNET reports that Apple now claims that “Psystar Corp. broke anti-piracy defenses that lock Apple’s operating system to its own hardware.” Besides Psystar, other cloners were involved, but Apple refused to name them.
“Persons other than Psystar are involved in Psystar’s unlawful and improper activities described in this Amended Complaint,” Apple said. “The true names or capacities, whether individual, corporate, or otherwise, of these persons are unknown to Apple. Consequently they are referred to herein as John Does 1 through 10.”
When Apple filed a lawsuit against Psystar in July alleging copyright infringement, inducement of copyright infringement, and trademark infringement, among other legal claims, Psystar responded with a counter-lawsuit.
Two weeks ago, a federal judge dismissed charges from Psystar that Apple is a monopolist because it tightly controls which computer makers build machines using its Mac OS X software. Psystar has been selling so called ‘Open Computers’ using Apple’s operating system for several months now - in violation of Apple’s licence.
In a filing dated Nov. 26, Apple amended its original lawsuit because it “discovered additional information.” New accusation against Psystar includes allegation it violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by tampering with copy-protection technologies.
“Apple employs technological protection measures that effectively control access to Apple’s Copyrighted Works,” the revised complaint read. “Defendant has illegally circumvented Apple’s technological copyright protection measures that control access to Apple’s Copyrighted Works.” Apple says that Psystar created and marketed code that ”avoids, bypasses, removes, descramblers, decrypts, deactivates, or impairs a technological protection measure without Apple’s authority for the purpose of gaining unauthorized access to Apple’s Copyrighted Works.”
Psystar continues to sell cloned Macintosh computer systems with pre-installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard starting at $554.99.
This epitomizes one of the realities of DMCA — it made legal things illegal.
Before DMCA, the law encouraged reverse engineering of products in commerce. Part of the trade-off to encourage innovation was to let people reverse engineer so they could see how things in the public domain worked and then design around the scope of any corresponding patents.
It just bugs me … a wrong to be righted.