USB-IF Slaps Palm In iTunes Spat

An anonymous reader writes "The USB Implementers Forum has finally responded to Palm's complaints that Apple is violating its USB-IF Membership Agreement by preventing the Pre from syncing with iTunes. It's found in favor of Apple. Worse, it's accused Palm itself of violating the Membership Agreement by using Apple's Vendor ID number to disguise the Pre as an Apple device."

Comments

Talk about a pathetic article

[falcon5768]

Seriously can we keep business politics out of this? You may not like Apple but a lot of people from day one called into question Palms legality on their faking out iTunes from this very reason all the way down to the very fact that nothing said Palm even had to use iTunes as they could have used a third party player, a plugin for iTunes like Blackberry and WinMobile users use without any complaints from Apple, or made their own software . Just because you dont like the outcome does it in any way mean that the outcome wasn't the right one.

Re:Talk about a pathetic article

[kannibal_klown]

I don't think either party was the hero in this battle, but Palm deserved what it got.

Apple provides legitimate methods to connect a device to iTunes via a public API and/or Toolkit. This lets them support things easier by making sure the public API works after changes.

I see it as less "anti-competitive business practice" and "we want to stop the ball rolling on companies tricking iTunes so support doesn't become a problem."

Look at it this hypothetical scenario which is NOT the case here but goes to the overall problem.

- Lets say ALL of the device companies out there decided to skip the API and do what Palm did: trick it.

- Apple legitimately wants to change something on their end with the way iTunes interfaces with iPod/iPhone.
Do something neat / tricky to add a feature or improve performance that they KNOW works on the iPod/iPhone.

- But now they have to worry about breaking every other device out there because the hardware and capabilities are different.

- So now you have to wonder "is this REALLY an iPhone?"

* If only there was some way to know for sure which device this was?

* Oh wait! THAT's what Vendor ID is for.

------------------

This is the sole point of the public API and/or Toolkit. You state funcX() returns Y. Maybe one day you want to add funcZ() or replace funcX() with funcX21() . Maybe you eventually upgrade the API / Toolkit so the client code needs to be changed but it's on the other companies to stay current, not you supporting other companies' devices.

Re:Palm Got What They Deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Why syncing with iTunes need to be authorized?

Think of Barcodes

[MosesJones]

To all those people who think "What is the big deal about faking yourself as Apple?". The point is that these are reserved identifiers in the same way as barcodes are reserved identifiers.

Would it be right for Palm to use the iPhone barcode for the Pre? Clearly not.

So here is another case where there is a specific rule around reserved identifiers and Palm broke the rules. Their alternative is to opt-out of the USB group and do it themselves without its blessing or just suck it up.

Complaining about the rules of a game after joining the table and playing a few hands is just dumb.

Re:Palm Got What They Deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only does it not need to be authorized, it is also legal to circumvent any and all obstructions which have been put into place to prevent syncing with iTunes, per explicit exemption in the DMCA for creating compatibility.

Letter to FDA

[MBCook]

Dear FDA,

We here at Bob's Atrocious Dealings are having a problem and require your help.

As you may know, Neodyne Inexpensive Care-taking Equipment gives away free diabetes test strips as an incentive to get people to buy their Glucodex 1726 Blood Glucose Meter. These strips are coded to only work with their meter.

We here at B.A.D. sell a competing meter, the Blud-O-Matic 666, which has been designed to use their free strips by pretending to be their meter.

Now you may not have known about our device, as we didn't submit it to you for review. You approved our previous product, the Seth's-Audi-Scope 1996, so we figured you'd be good.

Now our customers, who use the free strips that N.I.C.E. provides their users, are having problems since they keep changing the way their meter works. This is causing us problems, and our confused customers aren't even asking us for support sometimes since they think it's N.I.C.E.'s fault.

FDA, please slap down N.I.C.E. for hampering competition by making it hard for us to profit off their hard work by deliberately changing their strips to fail with our unregistered, uncertified meter. It's confusing our customers that one of the features we trumpet in all our marketing keeps breaking.

Sincerely,
Edward Vi Lancelot

Not surprising.

[clone53421]

Palm claimed Apple was violating the spirit of the agreement by using their vendor ID to lock iTunes to their products.

Palm used this to justify breaking the actual letter of the agreement by using Apple's vendor ID to trick iTunes into thinking Palm devices were iPods.

So, guess who got in trouble? The guy who actually violated the agreement, of course.

Re:apple - the most anti-open company

[0100010001010011]

WebKit, Grand Central, Darwin Streaming Server, LaunchD (some Linux please pick this up...), Bonjour (Yes ZeroConf, but I think they're the first to make it popular), Even XQuartz so that OSS stuff that uses X11 can run under OS X looking like OS X. They even have a cute little website with the word 'forge' in it: http://macosforge.org/

  Hell they even have Darwin, the base of OS X. Lets see Microsoft release an OSS version of XP minus some GUI bits.

Yes, Apple is protective of quite a bit of stuff. But they're released a ton more OSS that I've found than MS.