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Psystar Claims Apple Forgot To Copyright Mac OS
Preedit writes "Mac cloner Psystar is claiming in new court papers that Apple's copyright suit against it should be dismissed, because Apple has never filed for copyright protection on Mac OS X 10.5 with the US Copyright Office. Infoweek is reporting that the claim, if it holds up, could open the door for third-parties to enter the Mac market without fear of legal action from Apple. In its latest set of allegations, Psystar is also accusing Apple of bricking Macs that don't run on genuine Apple hardware." We've been following the Psystar-Apple imbroglio since the beginning.
I thought since the US joined the Berne convention in the 80s or 90s, registration with the copyright office is not required...
It is required if you want statutory damages (you know, those crazy numbers like $25,000 per song downloaded or whatever it is the RIAA threatens people with). Otherwise the worst you can sue for is actual damages - in this case the cost of a copy of OSX for each copy made.
It sure would be funny if it is true.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I wasn't using a Mac during the last time Apple allowed clones, but several people I knew at the time all claimed that their clones were generally faster than the machines Apple sold. So now that I us OS X, I'd like some Intel clones... but not from these clowns. They sound like the SCO of cloners.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
A few months back I would have never bought conspiracy theory that Psystar was mearly a front for other companies who wanted to bundle OS X (think SCO - MS) but with their tenacity and resources I am starting to wonder who Psystar really is. Oddly even Apple has asserted this claim in court docs. Once this is over we will surely hear some interesting stories.
The Berne Convention will be out the window if we ever pass the Orphan Works bill that Corbis keeps trying to push down our throats.
That's the worst argument I've ever heard. I've got two words for you Psystar: Berne Convention
From the article you link to:
I suspect this is what Psystar are referring to, rather than Information Week's rather short, content free insinuation that Apple loses all rights if they fail to register.
You'd almost think they were organized just to antagonize Apple. Hmm...
Testing the waters, Hardware vendors want to sell something other than windows. I'm willing to bet one (or more) of the big 5 PC vendors is behind this
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Apple is claiming that the boxed copies are upgrade versions, and not the original license. So "actual damages" would still include whatever cost Apple claims (or could convince a court of 8-)) for the original license.
"Psystar is accusing Apple of bricking generic PCs that are attempting to illegally run OS X"
It is not illegal to run OS X on generic PCs. It is a violation of the license, but the license does not carry the force of law. At this point, I'm not even sure that it's been settled that licenses are enforcible, given that their terms aren't available prior to the customer paying for the product, which makes it a sale or purchase.
Follow the money? It just might lead to Redmond, Palo Alto or Round Rock.
Apple will never let anyone run OSX on non Apple hardware. As long as they want to keep their hip turtle neck wearing image they must keep complete control. Imagine Dell selling dull gray OSX computers for half the price Apple does? Or OSX Latitudes. The once hip OSX now runs on un cool nerdy looser PC guys computer. Not cool.
No I am not bashing Apple or its users. This is what their marketing department must think. Remember Apple is kept alive by what I believe is a damn good marketing machine. It keeps Apple looking hip no matter what. Take away the cool hip design and marketing and your looking at another boring PC (technically an Apple is a PC). How else can you explain people high fiving each other when they bought their shiny new iPhones?
You don't understand because you don't follow legal precedents in copyright law.
Pystar are trying to make that claim that the Mac OS X bootloader detects their hardware and refuses to run on it. That's illegal - so says the Supreme Court - as it denies competition. That is, you and I are required to buy a computer from Apple and only from Apple if we want it to run Mac OS X. What's more, the Lexmark case has declared that code written to enforce monopoly control is void of copyright. Pystar would really love to have Mac OS X stripped of copyright.. that would make their business model a whole lot more profitable.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Mac OS X runs just fine on a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 with the EFix (efi-x.com) gizmo and YES IT is still Mac OS X. Can't tell the difference! 4 core processor, 8GB RAM... lots of disk (up to ten 1.5 tera byte drives for that motherboard). NVidia graphics board with 30" Samsung display (so gorgeous I have two, one on my mac book pro and will never go back to the smaller displays for my machines).
So yes, Mac OS X is just the same on "generic" hardware.
Apple could specify supported configurations and keep the drivers open. NeXT did this very successfully with OpenStep 4.3 years ago. In fact many years after NeXT was purchased by and took over Apple people were still writing drivers for OpenStep!
It can work. They've proven it before.
Microsoft needs to be whipped by a better system. Unleash the beast Apple. Unleash it for the good fight against Microcrap.
I'll be really surprised if Apple doesn't agree to simply make a deal with Psystar to manufacture clones for a licensing fee. It isn't that radical - Apple licensed Mac clones back in the late 80s - early 90s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#The_first_Macintosh_clones ). My uneducated guess is that Psystar has been negotiating for a licensing agreement for a long time, and then calculated that an outright court battle would land them a better deal than paying the fees initially suggested by Apple.
That or they're a fly-by-night outfit.
Jeremy
>No, the automatic protection allows for criminal prosecution. If you want to sue yourself you have to register.
Sort of. The trouble you'd run into, is that the law allows Apple to make that registration at *any time*, like, say, on the morning of your hearing.
Even without the statutory damages, they *can* sue you, and there is no limit to what they can ask for as damages. It's good to have things registered because that constitutes "Notice", which provides the plaintiff with an automatic advantage in terms of preponderance of evidence,
The misconception all over the thread, is that without the right to seek statutory damages, Apple would be limited in the amount of civil damages they could seek. This is untrue, and I can assure you that the amount of "actual damages" that Apple's very expensive and capable legal team would confront you with over OSX, would utterly dwarf even the "per infringement" maximum of statutory damages. And even if they sought statutory damages, which they still would do, that would basically amount to nothing but a "tip" on top of the really stupendous civil damages, which would seek liquidation and civil forfeiture of, 100% of your assets. Willful and knowing copyright infringement on an institutional scale is really not a good idea, registration or not.
IANALBIHSLAWITF, consult a lawyer before you do something boneheaded like putting yourself on the defendant end of a civil suit with Apple.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The copyright is for "10.5" not "10.5.0".
Psystar's claim is that they buy commercially available leopard disks and use them.
I've not bought a retail version of Leopard lately, but there is still a pretty good chance that it's 10.5.0. After all, it'll boot any machine that did not come with leopard (and hence, has it's own restore disks). Not sure why Apple would go through the effort to make a new version, the only pay off is to save bandwidth starved users from downloading a combo update.
Just because Apple shipped macs with 10.5.1 ... 10.5.6, doesn't mean you can buy the disks. The only way to get them is to buy a new mac.
Though, I guess you can claim that THOSE disks don't have a copyright, and thus you are copying them. Buy one new mac, get a leopard disk and use it.
But, since you get hit for "only costs", Apple can claim these non-retail disks cost more. And, in fact they do as they contain iLife and an emergency disk. As well as some effort to make them run on the new machine (which wouldn't run the current version of OS X when they were released).
And, that pre-supposes that Apple has to re-register point releases to get the full benefit of Copyright protection. If I fixed some errata in a published book, and did not re-file the copyright, is it still fully protected? And is this what 10.5.1 is?
How much change is needed before someone has to re-file?
So car manufacturers are obligated to provide parts for fifteen years after last sale, and pattern part manufacturers are permitted to operate within certain constraints, and car manufacturers aren't permitted to insist that initial warranties are dependent on dealer servicing (although they are allowed to impose this on `extended' warranties). But makers of domestic appliances, say, can decline to sell parts, sue people who copy them and tear up warranties for equipment that you've tried to repair with, and all you can fall back on is sale of goods act rights or their local equivalent.
Now this all changes once you exert significant market power. BT isn't allowed to insist you only use their phones on their lines, say, because it's a regulated company which has market power. Microsoft (like IBM before it) is the US equivalent: it's been found to be a near-monopoly (ie to exert significant market power) both in the US and the EU, IBM weren't allowed to `close' interfaces between their CPUs and their disks; Honeywell were. Microsoft are legally bound to disclose the APIs and protocols used between their applications and their operating systems; Sun aren't.
And Apple aren't, either. Psystar are pissing in the wind, attempting to argue that there's a monopoly market for OSX which Apple run. That's like arguing there's a monopoly market for Cadbury's Dairy Milk, totally ignoring the rack of Hershey Bars next to it. For as long as there's a reasonably substitutable good which isn't under the control of monopolist, trusts are very hard to prove.
This is why Apple was kept alive by Microsoft in the 90s, and is why Microsoft continue to build and develop Office for OSX (and, particularly, Entourage): by showing that there are alternative platforms for Office they greatly reduce the power of the government to regulate them. I'm always surprised that Microsoft are so antagonistic to Linux and Open Office: if they could show there were three credible, available desktop operating systems with application stacks on them, they could nip over to the anti-trust people and make the point that they aren't a monopolist. And they'd be right, too.
ian
And some people stiull say that Apple hardware is not overpriced. The profit margins on the hardware must DAMN LARGE if they'd rather sell one system than one OS.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Apple would argue that there is no reason for them to check for a previous version. From Apple's point of view, in order to install them you need to have a Mac, which would have come with OS X, therefore making the boxed copy an upgrade.
Since you can't get a Mac without OS X, all boxed copies of the OS are upgrades.
Clones were bad for Apple because Apple produced high-quality hardware. The clones produced machines with better specs, but much cheaper components, so were able to undercut Apple and take away their business. Now, however, Apple produce fairly shoddy computers (in absolute terms - they're still a bit better than a few of their competitors), from off-the-shelf components. From their financials, their margins on most computers are less than a boxed copy of OS X, which means that letting people install bought copies of OS X on other hardware would be in their interests.
A few years ago, I suggested that they should partner with IBM or Sun to sell OS X-based machines for the business market. They would license OS X under a non-compete agreement, so the other company could only ship machines in market segments where Apple didn't have a product, and would both market each other's systems. IBM (back when they were making chips for Macs) would get a nice desktop OS for business desktops built with their chips, and Apple would get a second source. Sun would have been the other option, since they had quite a nice kernel and at the time the OS X kernel was an embarrassment (it's quite nice with 10.5), and had a history of working with Cocoa/OpenStep (although not one that makes them friends with Steve Jobs).
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