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Apple Defendants Interviewed
evands writes "There's an interview with Desicanuk, one of three named defendants in the Apple lawsuit alleging illegal distribution of a Tiger developer build, and Nessence, one of two administrators of MacTKA, the Mac BitTorrent tracker site where the build was initially posted, up at DrunkenBlog. The interview tells the whole story as a press release can not, from how Apple determined the kids to sue, to lawyers knocking on doors on Christmas Eve, and beyond. 'Collateral Damage' is a fascinating read which humanizes the whole messy situation."
"Some companies view a buggy leak as an opportunity to generate free buzz about the final product. Some view it as an opportunity to use the legal system to bludgeon extreme enthusiasts that have allegedly crossed the line."
And maybe some have so little respect for others that they'll violate the rules at every turn. Would it really have killed the Mac community to wait?
What can they gain? They can put a stop to the leak-like-a-sieve nature of the developer community, for starters. Of course, the community does not really leak like a sieve; the vast majority of developers stick to their NDAs. But because some done, and because really sophisticated technology has been developed to enable piracy on a vast scale, it looks like the developer community leaks like a sieve.
...friend, there is no such thing as bad publicity. As the old saying goes, the only way a company could be damaged in the press is if its CEO is found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
And as for this "bad publicity" thing of which you speak
This story has gotten Apple on the front page of newspapers --well, their business sections, anyway --worldwide, and has generated public awareness of the upcoming "Tiger" release, all essentially for free. It's good news for Apple as far as PR is concerned.
i'm a member of the site, and have been for a while. it's interesting that apple didn't try to shut down the site at all. they merely wanted to make sure that tiger betas didn't appear on the site.
we have all their software well seeded with people downloading, and they didn't give a damn. it was just the prerelease software.
it seems apple doesn't care too much about piracy and "lost sales"- they just don't want people judging them by prerelease software and getting the wrong impression.
Brent Simmons (a well known and respected Mac developer) released a "buggy" version of NetNewsWire 2.0, presumably to "generate free buzz about the final product."
What did he get for his trouble? How about being publically berated because a clueless user didn't know the definition of "beta."
As another poster put it, "you don't get to decide Apple's strategy for them." You're not the one that's going to have to deal with complaints from clueless users that don't understand why the pre-release version of Tiger has borked their mission-critical data.
...how Apple plays this one.
Was the kid a bit naive? Sure. I'm occasionally on invitation-only torrents in the Mac, and multi-platform, scenes, and the trackers are adamant about people NOT distributing the torrent files, themselves, on other trackers. Always lots of warnings regarding "Don't share torrents, outside." So, I give the kid the benefit of the doubt regarding his belief that the buggy beta would stay 'inside' somewhat. He made, as Nixon put it, 'an error in judgment', no question of that.
I also believe that the real asshole in this situation was the 'paid-up' ADC Member who had the 'seed' of Tiger, in the first place, and 'gave' it to the kid with the freebie ADC account. (Trust me, the 'free' ADC accounts never see 'seeds' of an OS. Period.) He's the one who should be taken to the cleaners, not the kids.
Apple Computer is also made up of 'smart' people, with history and experience. And they should know, (as well as most of us here) that 'good' people do 'bad' things, and smart people are capable of doing the stupidest things.
I did some freelance work in the Securities industry (as an investment analyst for a small group of fellows), and one of the truisms in Markets and market interventions is this: The mechanisms put in place after a crisis, stock crash, etc, are never sufficient to prevent the next shock, and what is more, the mechanisms, themselves, almost invariably guarantee that the next 'event' will be far worse than the one that precipitated the intervention, and its so-called 'protection'. We'll just see... the ball is in Apple's court... for the time being.