Sam Odio and the EFF vs. Apple Inc.

http://eff.org/press/archives/2009/04/27

by rms • 17 years ago

66 15 17 years ago

zhyder• 17 years ago

I hate that Apple is turning me into a hypocrite. I keep condoning their acts of bullying just because I like their shiny products. Any other company and I would have stopped funding it by now.

jrandom• 17 years ago

It pains me as well (I'll be getting a nice, shiny 8-core system in two months) but rationalize it with my realization that pretty much every company is evil -- I give my hard-earned paycheck to the least evil company that provides what I'm looking for.

zackattack5• 17 years ago

Can you humor me and define your terms? What makes a company evil?

danbmil99• 17 years ago

Go, Sammy, Go!!!

Seriously dude, great coup getting EFF involved. Long live the proletariat!

daveambrose• 17 years ago

Good luck Sam!

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

Does anyone know of any other cases of DMCA take-downs for this kind of content about Apple products, and how it turned out?

duskwuff• 17 years ago

A number of programs which broke the iTunes DRM have received similar takedown notices. I'm not aware of any attempts to contest the takedowns, which is probably because they were completely justified. :)

My understanding, based on what I saw of the relevant pages before they got taken down, is that BluWiki got a takedown because their users were (possibly inadvertently?) attempting to reverse-engineer an encrypted metadata database on the iPod which used the exact same format as the FairPlay key database on the computer.

dannyr• 17 years ago

Go Sam!

GHFigs• 17 years ago

Setting aside the glittering rhetoric of the press release for a moment...

Apple's specific claims are that posting disassemblies from their binaries (specifically, the memcpy() from the FairPlay DRM library) constitutes both circumvention of their DRM and infringement of their copyright on that code.

It is hard to argue that the former is not covered by the DMCA. The EFF has chosen the strange route of hammering on about the unencrypted iTunesDB file, as if Apple were claiming that it was the content that FairPlay is meant to protect. It's arguing intent vs. content. The intent might have been to reverse engineer the iTunesDB file, but the content that Apple is complaining about is relevant FairPlay.

The latter part is important as the DMCA's exception for reverse engineering, 1201(f), is only applicable if you don't infringe on copyright in the process. Here, the EFF is arguing fair use and de minimis. Without knowing how much code was posted (the letter from Apple's lawyer says "nearly nine pages", while the EFF's says "snippets"), it's hard to say what luck they'll have with that.

Sam Odio and the EFF vs. Apple Inc.

Related Stories