Real Worried About Apple Lawsuits

sebFlyte writes "silicon.com is reporting that Real is very worried that Apple will sue it over its Harmony technology that 'breaks' iTunes' FairPlay DRM to allow its music to play on the iPod. They acknowledged in an SEC filing that a lawsuit from Apple would potentially be very damaging to the company's bottom line, as it accepts that a court might not agree that the reverse-engineering is legal."

Comments

Oh boohoo

[mikeophile]

Anyone remember Streambox?

I don't think Real was whining about the DMCA then.

Re:wow....Wrong statement of law ... Asteroids

[ziani]

" . . . it is every company's responsibility, in fact under the law, to state all possibilities that may negatively affect a business, however remote those possibilities may be."

Not quite. It is every company's responsibility to state all facts that a reasonable investor might consider important in deciding whether to invest.

The required level of disclosure is certainly something less than "all possibilities . . . however remote [they] may be." Under this type of standard, a company would have to disclose the possibility of an asteroid hitting the corporate headquarters, or the possibility of the CEO's having a heart attack and an infinite number of other "possibilities".

To be fair (and at the risk of stating the obvious), Real's disclosure is right on the money. Given the current state of the law and the spectre of even a threatened DMCA action, any new technology that requires reverse engineering (especially one that goes straight for Apple's market) makes its author vulnerable, and disclosure in this case is warranted.