Apple hits Psystar with new charge
Apple has launched a new legal weapon in the ongoing case against ‘Mac-clone’ producers Psystar. It claims the production of the machines violates laws designed to protect digital anti-copying techniques.
The new charge, which is added to the existing filing, accuses Psystar of breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This is a law which, rather than dealing with copyright infringement itself, makes it an offence to produce technology designed to bypass digital copyright protection.
One of the most well-known examples of this law in practice is that it makes software designed to remove the CSS protection system of DVDs illegal. In principle, the law is designed to distinguish between products which can be used for both legal and illegal purposes (such as a tape-to-tape deck) and one which is inherently designed to allow users to breach copyright. As the ongoing case of RealDVD shows, this can be a gray legal area.
According to ComputerWorld, Apple made the new charge after it discovered (likely through examining Psystar documents as part of the case) that Psystar had bypassed protections built in to the OS X operating system. It said Psystar had created code which:
avoids, bypasses, removes, descrambles, decrypts, deactivates or impairs a technological protection measure without Apple’s authority for the purpose of gaining unauthorized access to Apple’s copyrighted works.
The key point to note there is that Psystar isn’t accused of marketing a product designed to breach copyright. Apple’s case is that in simply making the protection-busting code for its own use, Psystar has broken the law.
Apple also says that currently unknown people outside of Psystar helped develop this code. As it doesn’t have the details yet, Apple simply lists them as 10 ‘John Does’, though each of these could be an individual, a group or an entire corporation.
The filing has also been updated to include Psystar offering customers an OS X ‘recovery disk’, officially for use if they had problems with the pre-installed copy on their Mac clone.
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