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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.
This is a story regarding the countersuit to an Apple DMCA takedown notice. The EFF want publicity for this case.
The streisand effect would relate to apple's attempt to supress a few people talking about this on some forum and to shut the forum down, and now a lot more people are aware of the topic, the forum, and are talking about it.
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)
I think you're analyzing the Streisand effect from the opposite direction of those tagging the story that way.
Apple didn't want a few hobbyists on OdioWorks talking about making the iPod work with software other than iTunes. Now, because they tried to stifle that publicity, there are these suits. Now Apple will have a bunch of people aware that there's a group wanting to make iPods interoperable with other software.
It's Apple getting more publicity because they didn't want it that earned the story the tag. You're right that the EFF wants to raise awareness of issues like this, though.
It doesn't matter that talking about a product is not a violation of copyright law or DMCA law. Apple has big lawyers and a non-profit can't compete with that. What they did was comply with the lawyers demands, and then hire a lawyer (probably on commission) and are going to sue. If they win the suit they get to restore their information, and probably some compensation. If they lose they are at the same point (minus some time/effort) as they are now.
It's a shame that someone can sue someone else and ruin that person just on legal fee's. I am pretty sure the gov't does not provide free council to people in civil suits. It's a major flaw in our countries legal system.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Grammar advice is best dispensed from a house with sturdy brick walls.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
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.
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.
And you've just outlined the entire MPAA/RIAA prosecution strategy to boot...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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!"
My understanding is that they aren't claiming "copyright infringement", but rather DMCA anti-circumvention clause violations.
The anti-circumvention clause is the biggest problem with the DMCA. Issues of copyright term, severity of damages, etc. are all significant, but at least they make some kind of sense on the conceptual map of copyright law. Anti-circumvention says: you can't have, make, try to make, describe how to make, etc. anything for the purpose of breaking a copyright protection.
What's a copyright protection? Well, that's open to interpretation. How do we decide if something's purpose is to break a copyright protection? Also open to interpretation.
Apple seems to be saying that if you reverse-engineer their system to interoperate with other software, you can use that to violate someone's copyright - and that defeating some copyright protection in their system is the primary purpose for which you'd do it.
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.