EFF slaps Apple back for heavy-handed DMCA suit
So one of Bill Clinton’s less well thought through acts (apart from those involving blue cocktail dresses) was the DigitalMillenniumCopyright Act (DMCA). Apart from suffering the fate of having the all toocliché “Millennium” in its name, it suffers from being too broad, too vague and too encroaching on well established pieces of case law like fair use and reverse engineering.
Why Apple of all companies, who have been claiming from the very beginning that they didn’t want to put DRM on their content and that the media and record companies made them do it would use copyright and DRM cracking as an excuse to go after an open source (which they are supposed to love) project is beyond me.
I mean it’s not like Google or M$FT were chipping away at iTunes near planet-wide monopoly on music distribution by hatching somescurrilouscompetitive service. No… All the folks behind iPodhash were trying to do was to give users access to their content from platforms other than OS X or Windows, such as Linux.
Of note here is that Apple is not claiming that iPodhash cracked their DRM. They are using the DMCA to stop the team from reverse engineering the database structure. Reverse engineering is what spawned the tech industry in the 80′s. Without it we would have a VERY different IT market. There’d be virtually no competition as there’d be only one Bios, only Intel CPUs, one kind of RAM, etc, etc. We’ve all benefited from reverse engineering.
For Apple to take such a heavy handed approach to this situation is beyond my understanding. It smacks of the kind of out-of-character thing that corporations do when the lawyers have too much of a say in the decision making process. Cupertino needs to be very weary of such things as it’s the kind of behavior that takes the shine off a company’s image all too quickly.
Apple is sued after pressuring open-source iTunes project | Music and Audio | Playlist | Macworld.
Related posts:
- More hair-trigger madness – Gatorade terrorism anyone?
- #Microsoft #Windows 7 tool innovation all the way!
- Depeche Mode – Sounds of the Universe – The iPhone App
- IBM’s Papermaster finally gets to be Apple’s iPhone master
- Third-party iPod shuffle headphones will require Apple-licensed authentication chip
