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EFF Sues Apple Over BluWiki Legal Threats
Hugh Pickens writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against Apple to defend the First Amendment rights of BluWiki, a noncommercial, public Internet 'wiki' site operated by OdioWorks. Last year, BluWiki users began a discussion about making some Apple iPods and iPhones interoperate with software other than Apple's iTunes. Apple lawyers demanded removal of the content (pdf) sending a letter to OdioWorks, alleging that the discussions constituted copyright infringement and a violation of the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing copy protection measures. Fearing legal action by Apple, OdioWorks took down the discussions from the BluWiki site but has now filed a lawsuit to vindicate its right to restore those discussions (pdf) and seeking a declaratory judgment that the discussions do not violate any of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and do not infringe any copyrights owned by Apple. 'I take the free speech rights of BluWiki users seriously,' said Sam Odio, owner of OdioWorks. 'Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussions.'"
Random BedHead Ed adds ZDNet quotes EFF's Fred von Lohmann, who says that this is an issue of censorship. 'Wikis and other community sites are home to many vibrant discussions among hobbyists and tinkerers. It's legal to engage in reverse engineering in order to create a competing product, it's legal to talk about reverse engineering, and it's legal for a public wiki to host those discussions.'"
Fearing legal action by Apple, OdioWorks took down the discussions from the BluWiki site
This is what you get when lawyers are too expensive. Censorship.
They keep doing very useful (and thankless) work.
-- Let's go Viridian.
A thought, if Apple is claiming copyright juristiction on the conversation, would that not mean that Apple was claiming that it had written said conversations, in whole or part, and by which, by extention, are encouraging people to do the activities therein? Could make some interesting arguements in the courtroom. IANAL but from my viewpoint, Apple does not have much of a legal leg to stand on here.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
This is a story regarding the countersuit to an Apple DMCA takedown notice. The EFF want publicity for this case.
No Streissand Effect here, folks.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'd like to hear both sides of the story. As important as the EFF is, they tend to ignore anything that doesn't fit with their message, especially when it comes to legal proceedings.
Since Apple is Apple, I doubt we will hear much from them. But I would like to point out that there is a strong bias on the part of the EFF to selectively use facts for propaganda.
See: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/14/193217
Chickenshit?
Oh, you mean "Not willing to go to court with Apple and possibly lose his business in damages."
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Grammar advice is best dispensed from a house with sturdy brick walls.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yet, they did Sam, because you were too chickenshit to stand up to them. Now you want to stand behind a court decision before you muster up the "courage" to re-post the posts. If you are really concerned, re-post then go to court. Defend your users.
That's pretty big talk. You do realize that being sued, even if you win, you still lose because of the lawyer fees. Apple can afford to spend millions on their lawyers, can you afford millions on your lawyers? Do you think Sam can? What he did was smart. He backed off so they couldn't bury him into the ground in legal crap and then sued for the right to repost the data. His lawyer may be charging on a comission. If they win Sam and his lawyer will get paid, and the data will be restored. If he stood up to Apple at best he would have his information remain on the site, but he would still had spent a lot of money defending himself.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Anal rape in every box.
Where can I get one for my ex?
"Seriously, there's no "Linux compatible" label on their products, so why the fuck would they buy it and THEN complain?"
There's no linux compatible sticker on anything much.
An iPod without the managing capacities of iTunes makes no sense.
Only if you're an idiot. Some of us can use these things called file systems to hold and manipulate files. They've been around a while, surprised you've never heard of them.
They should be buying a mass-storage MP3 player which requires no special software.
Like an iPod? They don't require special software, Apple just deliberately make it difficult to use with other software.
In conclusion, fuck off retard.
If you want flexibility and choice then why use an iPod? I respect the BluWiki guys for standing up to Apple, but seriously, it's so much easier to take the path of least resistance and use an MP3 player that supports Explorer or Finder or command line mounting. Then you can use your player as a storage device as well. iPod and Zune are equally miserable in this regard.
My player of choice is the Creative Zen. It comes with proprietary software, but it's optional so you can use Explorer if you prefer. Only drawback is that they only come in solid-state flavours, no HDD, so the max capacity is 32GB (in case you only sit at a computer once every 3 months to add new music).
Learn to comprehend what's going on. They're not saying it's Apple's fault for not making the iPod compatible, they're saying Apple can't attempt to stop them from doing that work themselves.
It's entirely reasonable for Apple to say "We're not going to support that", but when they say "We're not going to support that and we'll sue you if you try to make it work", we have a fucking problem.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Ok, I withdraw my chickenshit comment. This makes sense to me
If you use iTunes, you don't care. I don't.
If you use (or would like to use) something else (gtkpod) to manage your iPod, then you might want to thank EFF.
Apple relied on reverse engineering especially in it's early days back when Woz was doing the Apple I and II. Steve Jobs sold Blue Box phone freak kits made by Woz that allowed you to bypass phone charges to there college peers. They need to lighten up.
And what I'm getting at is that unless you are hosting such a site and have refused to obey a cease and desist letter from Apple, inviting them to sue you, you can STFU about his level of courage and your opinion of how he should have shot himself in the foot just to spite Apple.
He is fighting back, in a far more intelligent manner than what you proposed. If he, and you, are right that Apple doesn't have a leg to stand on, then the only harm done is that the project was delayed.
If, however, you both are wrong about Apple's legal strategy and this isn't the making of another SCO level FUD battle, in other words if the judge actually buys Apples arguement, then his method at least protects him and his users from further harm in the matter. Your method simply leaves him bankrupt.
Argue the merits of the case, argue the merits of Apple's business strategy. But unless you've already put your own balls on the fire here, keep your trollish opines on Sam's to yourself.
DRM and DMCA, baby.
Don't you love the USA?
Why do geeks buy XBoxes and try to turn them into Linux PC's or media devices? Why do people jailbreak smart phones? It's because geeks are geeks, and the challenge is fun. As George Mallory would say, it's because they're THERE.
Secondly, even on a more practical note, the iPod is just a nice piece of hardware. I've dropped mine a thousand times and abused it repeatedly (err, non-sexually!)... and you just can't break the thing. I simply haven't found that kind of quality in competing devices, and I am certainly NOT an Apple fanboy by any stretch.
I put the RockBox operating system on my iPod (which still leaves you the ability to dual-boot into Apple's OS if you need to)... and now my iPod functions as a typical mass-storage player. I don't need iTunes, can just copy music files on and off like a USB stick, and have support for any format I'd want (e.g. OGG, Flac, etc). Combine that with the sheer quality of the hardware (my iPod has lasted three times longer than any previous player I've had), and I'm a happy geek. If other people want to port other OS's to the device, then that's awesome and more power to them.
Actually the newer songs don't have DRM at all. Of course you're right about older songs that are still encrypted with Fairplay.
The thing is, it's not about the music files anyway. DRM'ed or not, you can move the file around. The problem seems to be the files database itself that's been encrypted.
Reminds me of the old Tengen vs Nintendo case. If I remember corretly, they lost in the USA but won in Canada.
Of course it's a civil rights issue.
If I buy a product, I should get to use it any way that I like that is not a genuine patent or copyright infringement.
IOW: If Apple can't proceed here without using/abusing the DMCA then they really shouldn't have any standing.
Reverse engineering and discussing reverse engineering should be speech protected not
just as a civil right but protected as being consistent with the copyright clause of
the US Constitution.
Copyright is meant as a means to SPREAD INFORMATION.
Too many people tend to forget that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The Thought Police aren't coming to kill you, they are coming to enslave you. Feel like running now? No? Did I mention they are IMAGINARY? Now what are you going to do? How do you fight that which is only in your mind?
Your seriousness has killed the funny. You could have at least put it in terms of a pithy quote about liberty, lions and jackals, or free beer.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The courts have an easy way out of this one. They'll declare there's no "case or controversy" and dismiss the complaint, just like they did when the RIAA threatned Dr. Felten over releasing watermarking information.
The only way to get heard in court when someone sends you a C&D is to fail to desist, and let them sue you. Of course, given the other side has far more resources, that's kind of like taking up Dirty Harry on his "Do you feel lucky, punk?" challenge.
Nobody's violating your civil rights by offering you a product that requires special software.
That depends.
they're not violating your rights by not providing it for your platform of choice, or where it genuinely requires special software.
They ARE violating your civil rights by stopping you even talking about creating other software.
This is not "OMFG! Apple don't support linux! OMFG!", it's "A corporate behemoth is shutting down forums that talk about making other ways to interface with products we have legally bought"
Not all of those limitations are purely technical - a good many of them are commercial.
And most of the commercial ones are not or should not be legal with a device I bought. You don't get to tell me how to use the chair I bought from you, apple don't get the right to tell me how to use the iPod. They don't have to support it, but they have no right to stop me taking it apart, talking to it with other software or shoving it up my arse if that's what I want to do.
gtkpod and others using libgpod. Like Amarok and Rythmbox, though support is only preliminary for touch/phone.
They were all knocked back a bit last year when apple suddenly introduced a crypto hash on some of the indexes, but it was reverse engineered. I have yet to hear why there would be any reason at all to cryptographically sign a song index other than to prevent competing software from functioning properly.
And there's the other thing, if Apple had their way, they would shut all of these down. From TFA it looks like they were trying to stop even discussion of this stuff. There is no hard and fast requirement for iTunes except that apple likes to sue people and occasionally try to throw technical hurdles at them. It's just a mass storage device and some index files.
Why is it so hard for some people to believe that Apple isn't this wonderful non-profit business with only intentions of making the world better? They are a for profit business, like the rest of them, with profit as the bottom line. They sell products to make money. That is all. Some people like their products better than others. But don't equate the products they sell with how they run their corporation.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Congress enacted the law which Apple claims as the grounds for its action.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What I don't get is how the RDF has been so successful at making folks think Apple is better than MSFT, when it comes to freedom. I'm probably going get flamed for this, but what the hell, let us be honest here. Apple LOVES DRM, just like MSFT, Apple LOVES vendor lock in, just like MSFT. If they switched positions tomorrow Apple would be just as nasty when it comes to anti competitive practices as MSFT ever was when Darth Gates was running it(Damn I miss him. The monkey is like a bad Dilbert joke) and any attempt by anybody to go around their locks, even as we saw here to allow interoperability, will get their lawyers falling out of the sky on them.
So I honestly don't get it. The way you hear Apple fanboys talking you'd think Jobs is sitting in some office with his bare feet up tinkering these new toys by hand, when in reality Apple is nothing but a "Mini MSFT" that doesn't have a bumbling marketing monkey screwing with the line. But of course when Steve retires, well I'm sure they'll get their very own Ballmer. if they like Apple because they are shiny, or they think the brushed metal is cool,fine. But please quit trying to make it sound like Apple is this nice hippie company in California. They haven't been that since the Woz quit decades ago. They are just MSFT on a smaller scale, that's all.
They are just lucky that they still have Darth Jobs to wield the dark side of the force for them. All we MSFT users have is a really fat stormtrooper that couldn't hit the broad side of popular with a blaster rifle.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
sooo much more open?
If you're going to boycott every company that pulls this kind of crap, get ready to grow your own food and cultivate your own penicillin too. Monsanto and the drug companies make Apple look like total hippies.
After high school, you'll find out that they ALL play dirty. It won't change unless we reform our "IP" laws.
*sigh* Apple and Microsft aren't equal. In fact, they aren't equally detrimental to the world of computer science. And, it goes beyond scale.
Apple sells physical products, which happen to be preloaded with their own operating systems and software. Apple won't permit anyone to do much of anything with those systems, which apple doesn't approve of. Apple, bad, yeah.
Microsoft sells almost no physical products, instead relying on an established monopoly, created by intimidating manufacturers of computer hardware. Exclusivity agreements barred mfgrs from offering any competing systems on their hardware. By default, everyone in the world bought either MS operating systems, or they bought Apple, or they bought machines with no OS, or they simply bought the parts to build their own no OS systems. There was an enforced virtual MS tax on almost all computers for more than a decade, and many people still pay that tax. (I can find more proofs that MS is evil, but this one is enough to suffice) Microsoft evil.
On the one hand, we have bad. On the other, we have evil. Perhaps the bad boy would LIKE TO BE evil, but we don't know that, and we certainly can't prove it. Bad is bad, but evil trumps bad, every time.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Believe me, their reasoning was profit. One of their number crunchers indicated that their data says that the glossy screen will make them more money. (Cheaper manufacturing, initial test show people like it better, or even "Sure it is cheaper to make, but the average customer can't tell the difference", or what have you.) Their data may be in error, but I'm sure it was presented to their marketing folks as a big "plus" and not a huge "minus". Sometimes, *gasp* even Apple gets it wrong in predicting what people really want.
Or they want you to buy one of their big fancy displays by purposely making their built-in displays crap.
P.S. I know exactly what you mean though. My girlfriend does graphic design and she hates the new displays as well. Luckily she has one of the older ones that don't suck.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Yes, MSFT "owns" the OS, but the BIG difference is they don't "own" the hardware. And frankly I think it is debatable which is more evil. I remember what is was like before, where your Vic wouldn't talk to your TRS 80 which wouldn't talk to your IBM, etc. But frankly ANYBODY can write a Windows driver. I have seen more weird shit come out in the last 15 years or so, all because it was butt simple to write a Windows driver for any weird ass piece of hardware you could dream up. I mean you can even put a fricking cassette deck in your PC!
The point is before MSFT sold MS-DOS to Compaq, the entire PC world was "welcome to proprietary land" where nothing worked with anybody else and it was all crazy expensive. And now that the PC ecosystem has matured Linux(and BSD, and Haiku,etc) can take advantage of that to give us even more choice. Do most PCs come with Windows? Yep, because that is what folks want. They WANT to play their games, or have that nice shiny disc they got at the Wally World work, or have their printer/scanner/fax without praying to the Gods of CLI. If Apple would have won we would probably still have $3000+ machines that only those with serious cash could afford. Now I can slap together a machine with frankly insane power for less than $400. To me that is progress.
So as much as I HATE what that marketing ass monkey Ballmer is trying to push in 400 fricking versions, I still give credit where credit was due. If it wasn't for Darth Gates making it so it didn't matter whether I bought Dell, or HP, or Packard Bell(remember those), or Gateway,etc that everything worked as long as it had the Windows symbol on it things would be VERY different. Because I remember what it was like before MSFT, and frankly it really, REALLY sucked. If you think Apple makes great PCs, fine. I agree completely. Ferrari makes damned nice roadsters too, I can't afford those either.
But at least now I have choice. I can run WinXP(my choice) or Vista, I can run Linux, or BSD, or thanks to the wonders of the Internet I can even run a hacked version of OSX on generic hardware if I wanted to. But we probably wouldn't have that choice if Darth Gates hadn't screwed over IBM all those years ago. And looking at their actions I would have to say that Darth Jobs is JUST as nasty as Darth Gates, he just has less money but MUCH better taste.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.