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Psystar Loses Appeal In Apple Case
The dispute between Mac cloner Psystar and Apple has been a long and twisty one; now, reader UnknowingFool writes that "Last week, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled mostly against Psystar in their appeal of their case with Apple. The Court found for Apple in that they did not misuse copyright by having conditions in the OS X license. Psystar won on one point in which some of the court orders should have not been sealed."
...but not really unexpected. Apple does have good lawyers.
There was never any question that Pystar was in the wrong. Their activities were blatantly and obviously illegal.
Their whole market was based on selling hardware to run software that wasn't licensed to run on that hardware.
Their lawyers would have had to be completely incompetent buffoons to lose the case.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What if Microsoft did this today or even years ago? I don't think they would got off Scott free like apple does on this crap where they limited their software.
Never read so much uninformed, belligerently ignorant drivel, by posters that don't know what the word license means, or even that Apple only distributes OS-X as an upgrade outside the purchase of a Mac system.
When Snow Leopard released in 2009, you could buy both an upgrade option (~$29 and there were other assorted family packs of upgrades) and if you didn't have Leopard (10.5), there was a full version option (it was the Mac Box Set ~$169), which came with bundled with iLife and iWork since Tiger wasn't considered an upgrade option for the Snow Leopard installer. Tiger also had a full install box you could get for ~$199 back when it released a few years before.
It has only been with the new Lion release that they've gone upgrade only.
Your Apple history appears to be what is uninformed or is at least revisionist; you can even still get the full Snow Leopard installs off Amazon.
Psystar was doing their bundled installs before the upgrade-only download path was put together by Apple.
Now, I don't know if psystar was buying the Mac Box Set's or if they were just getting the $29 upgrade and selling it as 'full' . . . but I doubt it makes a difference since even the Mac Box Set wasn't intended to go on non-apple branded hardware; even with it being a full version.
To my mind, software upgrades are an economically efficient and pro-user offering. They are good for both the production and use side of the equation, allowing users to pay directly for the additional cost of development since their last version rather then all the original work and value that went into the product. They allow developers to reward their own supporters and more efficiently allocate resources. Additionally, "upgrades" should be (again, from a user perspective) simply full versions, identical, except cheaper and for existing users. This is how all commercial software I use works as well.
However, the entire concept of upgrades depends completely on legal licensing: that I can have a clause that says "you may not use this unless you previously owned a full version". I already see a number of posts, both here on Slashdot and on other forums (such as the comments with the Ars Technica article on this story), that are enraged at the result, and that argue that Psystar was "adding value" by "lowering hardware costs". The underlying argument is that, if a piece of software is sold, that should be that. However, how do those of you who argue for that square it with upgrading? Do you simply agree with the App Store take, where upgrades don't exist at all? Or do you have some other way of squaring things away?
As things have existed, Mac OS X offerings have all been upgrades and have been priced accordingly. There seems to be a reasonable consideration on both sides here: buyers pay less money, but in exchange have the restriction of needing to have a Mac as Apple has chosen to build their development around an integrated model. Do some of you think that such integrated models should be illegal, regardless of what benefits they offer? Should Apple be required by law to sell a "full" version of Mac OS X, and would you actually be willing to pay what that might cost (ie., if they said "full version, $400")? I'm genuinely curious about people's thoughts around this.
They have Augusto, where a CD that is mailed to DJs with a sticker that says "promotional use only, not for sale" still counts as a sale and the doctrine of first sale applies:
Then they have Vernor/Psystar which says a box of software sold in a store like a book or CD is not actually a sale because Apple says it isn't and because Apple says there are restrictions on the ability to transfer or use it:
I predict Vernor will fall if it makes it to the Supreme Court. It totally conflicts with Bobbs-Merrill vs. Strauss and 17 USC 109 and common sense. If it walks like a sale and talks like a sale then it is a sale.
Not that would help Psystar, they have other problems.
Let me explain this slowly: Show me any case where you could have bought a new Apple computer without an OS, OS X or OS 9 or otherwise. All Apple computers by Apple has had an OS installed when they were sold. Since 2001 or so that was OS X. Before that it was OS 9, 8, etc. With the clones it was iffy. If you buy a retail version of $NEW VERSION of OS X today to replace $PREVIOUS INSTALLED VERSION, it's an upgrade.
All Dells are sold with windows. There are all operating systems you can buy to put on a dell are upgrades of windows." (well, at one point they were, then you could get the N option with no OS and now its getting harder to get desktop/laptops from them without it).
The last time I checked, enterprises can order Dells without Windows which defeats your logic. Also remember not everyone buys a PC from an OEM with OS installed. Some people build their own PCs. So when MS sells a consumer Windows, they have to make a different one for upgrades or full retail at different prices. The first one has to detect an installed version before it can be used. With OS X all it has to do is detect that it's an Apple and sometimes if the hardware is capable of the new OS.
and a full version that ranged from 129-199 bucks depending on what they were bundling that was to cover anyone that didn't upgrade the last time.
Did you parse your sentence? The Full Box Sets allowed you to upgrade and skip a version. But it was an upgrade. As far back as I remember you could use the newest OS X disc and install onto machines without paying for intermediates versions. You were supposed to pay for the intermediate versions but Apple didn't really enforce it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The sheer volume of idiocy and wishful thinking on Slashdot about software licensing today is sickening.
One poster even claimed that you don't need a license for GPL software. Hellllooooo!?!?!?!? "General Public LICENSE".
Then there are the huge number of people who think they "own" the software they buy. Only the copyright holder "owns" software; everyone else is, at best, a licensed user.
All the wishful thinking and willful misunderstanding in the world won't change those facts.
And yes, you can write whatever you want into your licenses when you own the copyright on software. Someone may test it in court, but you as the OWNER have the right to require and defend any license terms you deam suitable.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The justice system has been around for awhile. It has many flaws, but smart people have actually tried to think through some of this stuff. You should consider that perhaps your 30 seconds of analysis is inferior to hundreds of years of trial and error.
Can you make a copy of it, change the ending, burn the original, and resell the new version?
That's exactly what Pystar was doing in this case. If you did that to your copy of Harry Potter then you would fully expect some legal ramifications.
Symbian is dead and shrinking(!!) rapidly at a rate of 16% per year. Even Nokia gave up Symbian and stopped developing it. Which sane person buys Symbian these days??
Apparently they are so dead that more people bought them than iPhones through 2Q11. I don't doubt that iPhone will probably pass Symbian when 3Q or 4Q stats come out, but iPhone has never been #1, yet.
Same applies to Symbian. Symbian is an OS. Not a phone.
Pretty much all Symbian are made by Nokia. If you want to differentiate between the various Nokia Symbian models, of which I haven't seen individual statistics, you'll also have to differentiate between the AT&T and VZ versions of iPhone, because they are actually quite different (GSM/HSPDA vs CDMA/EVDO), and I haven't seen individual statistics of those either.
It's really quite sad that iPhone people are so insecure that they resort to anonymous namecalling like kids on a playground (fandroid? Really?).
But yes iPhone is absolutely undeniably #1 in one thing... profit margin, but that translates to taking more of your dollars than any other manufacturer.
The appeals court indicated that the ruling did not provide a sufficiently detailed reason for that 1 point, and explicitly reads that they expect the ruling to probably be the same after the original judge reconsiders and spells out the details. So Psystar hasn't won that point, they've probably merely delayed their loss becoming final.
If Paystar just sold the hardware, and said "It can run OS X," but left it up to the end user to actually buy and install OS X, would that be OK? Paystar is not touching the actual software at all. And a company can get away with a whole lot of stuff by saying "It can..." My TV can run OS X if I mod it enough. So Paystar would push the EULA violation down to their customers (plus the expense of buying OS X). Or did I miss something in the ruling?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Psystar should have totally raped it and have it poke oodles of fun at DRM, EULAs, and stuff.
You have to agree to a laundry list of obviously ridiculous terms to install anything and you get nothing but popups when you try to run copyrighted video.
Then it would have constituted a satire.
i'm glad this happened in that it will upset iQueefs, but sad that it won't hurt Apple. :|
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Ironic that the legality of what people do can change from week to week, and silly that a company can say that its illegal to do this and that no matter what it is, instead of saying its breach of contract. This kind of thing is silly as they are not part of the government, no matter how much money they make, but because of the pull they have and their lobbyists they might as well be. Only in America.
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