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Palm Pre "iTunes Hack" Detailed By DVD Jon
CNETNate writes "As the reviews of the Palm Pre start to roll in, DVD Jon expands on previous coverage of the Pre showing up in iTunes as some sort of an iPod, by publishing the offending code Palm has used to enabled the feature. As suspected, in regular USB mode, the phone addresses itself as a standard peripheral. But in 'Media Sync' mode, it claims to be an iPod ... from a vendor known as Apple."
*If* this is the only way to get data from iTunes, then spoofing the model and vendor should be like the Game Boy requesting an image of the Nintendo logo at bootup. There was a court ruling back in the 90s (Sega vs Galoob, I think) that said the image was treated as a password to go through the BIOS bootup, therefore, anybody could put it in their games. This is probably a completely different ball game, though.
They are pretending to be an Apple device. I don't think that's legal.
This computer is claiming to be an IBM PC. IBM sued. IBM lost.
Why would Apple sue over this? On what grounds? There's no copy protection being circumvented, no cryptography being broken, it's a plaintext response. Also remember when that when Apple suggested legal trouble for Palm, Palm suggested that they wouldn't hesitate to strike back with their own patent portfolio. I can't see either party taking anything to court.
Okay, I have to set something straight. It doesn't look for the string "Apple." It looks for a 2 byte code which MEANS apple.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
I think Palm is counting on them yelling than then Palm will lean on them with their patents.
Remember Palm defined this space long before Apple did and from a few quotes from palm recently they are going to use that as leverage.
Quote from Palm CEO:
"The whole area of patents is elaborate; a lot of issues there, and a very complex area. One of the things we've done over 15 years is build a very extensive patent portfolio in the mobile computing space, one of the highest-rated patent portfolios in this space, which contains more than 1,500 patents. And the reason you do that is to have a defensive position in the marketplace. It's kind of like two little porcupines going around, and you don't want to touch each other because you might get stung. You peacefully coexist and everything's OK and we keep working together."