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Apple Files Suit Against Psystar
Reader The other A.N. Other, among others, alerts us to the news that Apple has filed suit against Psystar, the unauthorized clonemaker. (We've been discussing Psystar from the start.) The suit alleges violation of Apple's shrink wrap license and trademarks, and also copyright infringement. News of the lawsuit, filed on July 3, first surfaced on a legal blog. There's speculation that the case has been sealed.
...that it took Apple this long to get the legal ball rolling on this!
1. Create a line of Mac clones.
2. Sell them to an unwitting public.
3. Have Apple file suit.
4. Pay bonuses to all the execs.
5. Declare bankruptcy.
6. Shut down all operations.
Guess what... Everyone who bought a Psystar is left totally unsupported (which includes the all-important security hole fixes) and the execs made a bundle... Now, could Apple go after the execs personally for copyright infringement or (the soon-to-be-defunct) Psystar? Ironically, there was no consumer fraud here--businesses go under all the time and anyone who bought a Psystar would have had to know that Apple wouldn't support them...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Their current lineup is fairly competitively priced.
Go ahead and spec out a similar machine from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. When comparing apples to apples (heh), they might not necessarily be the best deal around, but are certainly competitive, and definitely not a ripoff.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I really hope this goes to trial and a judge rules on it. Partly because I think the judge would rule that Apple can't do what they're trying to do with their EULA, but even if the judge sides with them, it's still a clarification of the law.
I don't like existing in the murky world of armchair people positing what is and isn't legal. Plus, if it goes Psystar's way, I doubt it would be too long before larger manufacturers got on board. Once something becomes legal, corporations want all over it (well, I guess that applies to profitable things).
It takes a lot of preparation for them to reach this point and file proceedings, consider:
* exec hears about it, if it were Microsoft chairs would be thrown ... ...
* passed to the legal team to see if Apple have a case
* legal sign off
* paralegals do the groundwork, scrutinizing the EULA etc.
*
*
* case is filed in court?
In the past I've tried bringing legal action for trademark infringement, and the whole process just to get things started can take months and months especially if you're in a large organization with N-layers of forms & approvals required for anything like this.
Nah, they are a software company. The truth is that they can't be profitable selling Mac OSX at $150 a copy to compete with Windows, because they need a large developer team to keep pace with Microsoft and they have fewer unit sales.
So if Microsoft spends $1 billion on development, Apple probably needs to spend at least $500 million to keep up. Microsoft can distribute that cost among 20 million users at $50 each, charge $100 and make half profit. If Apple has 2 million users that comes out to $250 per user spent on development. (These aren't intended to be real numbers, just an approximation of the magnitude of the respective numbers).
Very few people would spend $500 on a boxed OSX so it's necessary to bundle with hardware that's intentionally kept unique, and lower-end models are limited in certain ways as a form of price discrimination. The uniqueness is part of the package, but it's also a way to obfuscate direct price comparisons.
Apple sells OSX UPGRADES at a reasonable price, but there's no way you'd catch them selling an "OEM" version anywhere close to $200 -- there'd be no ROI.
This is the only strategy a commercial OS vendor could resonably hope to use in a Microsoft-dominated market.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
There's a little more to it now. It sounds more like they're suing because they took the Leopard update, opened it up, modified files in it, and re-released it for themselves. I think they're considering that a copyright infringement.
And finally, how successful would OS/X be if Apple sold it as software for any platform, Microsoft-style? It would be earth-shakingly successful, probably garnering 50% marketshare within one year. And probably making 10x more money than they do now.
They tried that before. It didn't work out too well. Also, you're wrong.
One of the strengths of OS X is that it runs on a limited, well-understood suite of hardware. Bugs are easier to fix, components are easier to tweak, and new features are more easily added. I do not, and never have, believed that Apple would be well served by opening up OS X. It's a tightly run ship (for the most part), and opening it up to all hardware would serve neither Apple nor end users.
Actually, they do. Look at what just happened to Dell. Their EULA stated that you had to agree to arbitration, but a judge ruled that it was invalid. Just because a company writes something down on a piece of paper and sticks that piece of paper into a product that you buy, doesn't make it necessarily enforceable.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
Digidyne v. Data General. No requiring hardware to legally use software. It even involved a company which sold clones of Data General's. Precedent is on Psystar's side. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=473&invol=908&friend=nytimes
There's already precedent, and it doesn't go well for psystar:
There were legal mac clones at one point in time. When Jobs came back onboard, they released a new version of the OS whose license specified that you couldn't run it on unauthorized hardware (and to be authorized, the clone makers had a very high royalty to pay). The companies who went out of business due to that had just as much at stake as psystar. They didn't win then, and psystar isn't going to win now.
Sorry, boys, but you have to follow the terms of the license.
Frankly, I don't see how (from a legal POV) much difference between Apple's license only allowing you to run on Apple hardware, versus the GPL3's anti-tivoization clause.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
First of all, I never said "fanboi", I said "fanboy". Second, if you don't like it, I'm sorry, but that is the main reason for Apple's success, along with excellent marketing. They absolutely do not offer any real advantage (for their computers, their peripherals aren't bad) over the competition, do so at a much higher price, yet manage to sell their product. The fact that they sell only a small percent of systems out there only strengthens the case for the argument that fanboys are their primary demographic.
We don't even have to look at their products themselves to determine the mass numbers of fanboys out there. Like I said, the iPhone. It is a damn cool piece of hardware, and I give Apple props for making it. Before it came out, however, what was the buzz? We heard, every other day or so, how the iPhone was a revolution in mobile phone technology and would completely change the way we use phones. It wasn't, it hasn't, and it isn't going to. The iPhone is an excellent evolution of the phones that came before it, but it isn't the best, most revolutionary thing since sliced bread.
The over-hyped status of the iPhone proves, all by itself (and, I might add, isn't the only example), how many drooling fanboys Apple has for customers. Not all, perhaps, but a very large number indeed.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Styling too often has negative value (eg, the Mac mini doesn't even provide enough power from USB to charge an iPod Shuffle).
Is that true? I thought there was a standard for USB2. 5V or so.
Not doubting you, just mind-boggled.
The link points not to any decision, but to a dissent by Byron White objecting to the Supreme Court's decision not to hear on the case on appeal. The Court never explains why it chooses not hear a case, but Justices can publish a dissent from that decision if they feel it's warranted. There is no precedent established here, at least in the sense of a Supreme Court ruling.
Moreover, if you read White's dissent, he points out that tying agreements are not always per se illegal and can in some cases be pro-competitive. If anything his dissent, and the fact that the Court did not take on the Data General case, tells me that the law here is sufficiently murky that the relevance of this decision to the Apple/Psystar case is debatable.
Do you really think that, if the law is as clear-cut as you think, Apple would be undertaking this litigation? My guess is that Apple's attorneys believe that the DG case does not provide a sufficient precedent to decide automatically in favor of Psystar. We'll see if the courts agree.
That is correct, but the Appeals Court's decision falls on Psystar's side. While this is by no means definitive in the case in question, it is a legal precedent at the federal level, and it relates directly to the matter at hand.
How much money is the OSX86 project generating? And what hardware are they selling?