Apple sued over DCMA discussion stance
Apple has been involved in a lawsuit which could test the limits of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The case involvs the rights of an audio technology forum.
The lawsuit was filed against Apple by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and OdioWorks, the company that operates the audio technology forum Bluwiki. The OdioWorks forum last year hosted a discussion about an ongoing open-source project aimed at helping iPods and iPhones work with media management software other than Apple’s iTunes. In the midst of this discussion, last November, Apple’s attorneys demanded that the Bluwiki.com Web site remove that project, called iPodhash, because it violated the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.
The lawsuit was filed jointly by the EFF and attorneys representing OdioWorks, the small Herndon, Virginia, company that runs Bluwiki. Lawyers from both parties argue that the iPodhash discussions were about the reverse-engineering of software, rather than about breaking copy protection, and ask for a court ruling to clarify the matter, according to a PC World story. EFF has previously been involved in litigation which argued that reverse engineering in order to build new products is permitted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
According to attorneys, the Bluwiki case is different than those in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation has previously been involved. Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with EFF, said, “This is the first time I’ve seen a company suggest that simply talking about reverse engineering violates the DMCA. All of the previous cases have been cases that involved actual successful reverse-engineered tools.”
The Bluwiki site is a free wiki service that hosts discussion pages for a number of projects, including iPodHash. After Apple demanded in November that the iPodHash discussion be taken down, three Web pages containing information about a cryptographic function used within iTunes were removed from the Bluwiki Website. Open-source developers have been working on breaking cryptographic mechanisms used by iTunes since 2007, when Apple first introduced a special operation (a checksum hash) to ensure that Apple’s various audio reproduction devices were communicating with iTunes and not some other, non-Apple, music management software.
The Bluwiki operator does not feel that anything it was doing in any way violated the DMCA. The founder of OdioWorks, Sam Odio, also believes that the iPodhash project’s lead developer will pick up the open-source discussion if OdioWorks and the EFF win the case. Odio said, “What this guy was doing was legitimate. He was just trying to reverse engineer Apple’s products to try to get them to work with Linux and other third-party software.”
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