Jake Widman
Friday, 24 July 2009 00:43
IT Industry -
Strategy
Page 1 of 2
Apple has withdrawn its legal threats against the Bluwiki website for hosting discussions of how to sync iPods with software other than iTunes. In response, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has dismissed its lawsuit against Apple.
The brouhaha started over Apple's introduction of a checksum hash algorithm into iPod software and iTunes, to ensure that iPods and iPhones would only sync with Apple's own iTunes.
The first version of the algorithm was reverse-engineered in short order, but Apple in turn updated its software to again block such media managers as Media Monkey and Songbird from being able to sync with its devices.
That sparked a discussion on Bluwiki, a public wiki host, of how to crack the updated algorithm.
Despite the fact that the operators of Bluwiki were not themselves publishing the information, they received an e-mail from Apple's lawyers contending that the discussion was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The lawyer wrote, "FairPlay [Apple's DRM technology] is considered anti-circumvention technology under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA explicitly prohibits the dissemination of information that can be used to circumvent such technology."
The e-mail went on to ask that Bluwiki disable several threads on the subject.
For more, see Page 2.
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