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Apple Backs Off DMCA Threats Against Wiki
netbuzz writes "A wiki operator who was pressured by Apple's legal team into removing anonymous discussions about circumventing the company's music-playback software for iPods and iPhones says he is relieved that Apple has backed off and he'll be able to restore the disputed material. Apple dropped its claims of copyright and DMCA violation against BluWiki only under legal pressure of its own in the form of a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
>>>I have to ask: what's Apple's motive here?
Same motive that leads Apple to lock-up its Macintosh hardware. Apple is afraid they might end-up like IBM, who lost control of their PC invention and was undersold by the clones. IBM was lucky that it had lots of other businesses and didn't need the PC to survive, but Apple without the Mac or iPhone or iPod business would probably go bankrupt. Apple doesn't want to join the ranks of Atari or Commodore.
So they stringently enforce control over their hardware, to prevent potential loss of business to clones.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The motive is greed, the objective is monopoly control.
Apple makes money off more than just hardware, they make a killing off software and services as well. It is no secret that many businesses in the United States utilize ethically questionable and often times out right illegal business tactics to establish and maintain monopolies that provide an opportunity for the business to control the market prices of their products rather than the other way around.
None of this is new and Federal legislation was passed to provide the Justice Department with the means to stop this type of activity, note the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. Unfortunately there seems to have been a shift in the thinking in the Executive branch and the Department of Justice as one of the most recent and significant cases, the DOJ case against Microsoft, resulted in a slap on the wrist and business as usual to this day.
There is also the stupid bits of the American legal system that says they must defend their patents/trademarks/etc or lose them.
This is both wrong and irrelevant. Only trademarks have to be defended or lost, and trademarks are not involved in this case. Patents, copyrights etc. can be defended selectively or not at all without losing them. Also this case appears to entirly a DMCA case, i.e. about circumventing copy protection measures - no patents or (Apple) copyrights involved.
He's the CEO of a corporation. He makes decisions that he sees as the profitable ones. That's what CEOs are supposed to do. If CEOs didn't have that instinct then none of us would have any sort of cheap hardware to run our choice of OS and software on.
Apple eventually dropped their lock-in DRM from the iTMS (but not until more than a year after some of their competitors, like Amazon),
Not really true.
Apple was the first legal download service to feature major-label music DRM-free. "iTunes +" was introduced with the EMI catalogue in May 2007. Amazon's MP3 store launched in September 2007, and it wasn't until 2008 that they got all the major labels on board.
Perhaps you are referring to April 2009, at which time DRM had been removed from the entire iTMS catalogue. Yes, there was a delay here (maybe it was Apple's fault, maybe the music companies were being awkward? We might never know) but your empasis of this milestone over the introducion of iTunes plus is misleading in the extreme. There is no question that Apple led the way with DRM-free downloads from significant artists. If it were not for their successful experiment with EMI, it is barely conceivable that the major record labels would have licensed DRM-free downloads to anybody else.
They should have just moved all the existing pages to Wikileaks during the downtime. A legal discussion that Apple was using legal threats to suppress ought to have qualified.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's elementary, theoretical concepts of trade. In the real world, all out war between sellers and buyers results in less profits for sellers, and less goods for buyers. Trust is an important part of trade, and without it, sellers won't be able to offload their goods, and buyers won't feel confident in forking over their cash. There is real incentive for being conservative in business, and actually giving customers what they want. The same goes, to a much lesser extent, for buyers; if they rock the boat too much, or demand prices that are too low, then sellers will sell to someone else, or if every seller does it, they'll find some other way to make money.
That's not to say we should all like companies, or that we should always blindly give them the benefit of the doubt, but it doesn't usually hurt to prefer one company over the other, and build some basic trust relationship with them. One example I'm sure we're all aware of is our ISPs, who we trust to provide us internet services.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
It's still coming through their distribution source. Developers have to pay US$99 per year if they want to be published, even if they are selling free app's.
What they don't want is people being able to play flash games or ROMS from other sources. This kills the revenue source for selling SDK's as well as that from Tetris clone 297 selling for A$2.99.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.