Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 07:34
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Among other things, the DMCA prohibits the avoidance of technological protection measures to gain unauthorised access to copyrighted material. Relatively clear-cut infringements under the DMCA include stripping protection from purchased DRM-infected music files to allow their use on generic players.
According to
Computerworld, Apple's revised complaint states that "Apple employs technological protection measures that effectively control access to Apple's copyrighted works" and that "Defendant has illegally circumvented Apple's technological copyright-protection measures."
Apple also claims that Psystar acted in concert with "John Does 1 through 10" - in other words, ten people whose identities have yet to be determined.
It might be fortunate for Apple that it isn't relying on the DMCA allegations to prevail against Psystar, as it has been implied that someone doesn't have a clear grasp of what the Act does and does not prohibit.
Apple recently succeeded in getting an open-source project called ipodhash removed from the Bluwiki web site by invoking the DMCA. alleging that the project was circumvention technology under the terms of the Act.
According to Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann, the allegation is
unfounded for several reasons.
Firstly, "If Apple is suggesting that the DMCA reaches people merely talking about technical protection measures, then they've got a serious First Amendment problem."
Secondly, if anyone owns the copyright to the iTunesDB files that software such as ipodhash is designed to manipulate, then it is the owner of the iPod, not Apple.
Thirdly, the iTunesDB file is not protected, and the checksum hash is there simply to make it harder for software other than iTunes to access the file.
Fourthly, the DMCA specifically allows for reverse engineering to allow interoperability, providing the purpose is not to infringe copyright. (The ipodhash project's motivation is to allow music player software other than iTunes (such as gtkpod and Winamp) to work with the iPod.
Please
read on.
