Apple attacks bloggers, websites over iPhone skin for competing smartphones

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 15 January 2007 10:36

Your IT - Entertainment

It had to happen: someone decided to copy Apple’s copyrighted iPhone icons for the Pocket PC and Palm smartphones. No extra functionality is delivered, and your phone is not magically transformed into an iPhone, and Apple is NOT HAPPY. But it sure looks cool!

If you’ve seen the photo of the iPhoto ‘home screen’ on Pocket PC devices, take a good look – Apple doesn’t want you to see it again. It reminds me of when a developer decided to emulate the Apple click wheel in software for Pocket PC devices, so your Pocket PC looked and worked (on the surface) like an iPod, with the click wheel activated by touching the screen. Apple struck quickly and it disappeared from the Internet.

Now it’s happened again, with TechCrunch highlighting the issue (and showing an image of what a Pocket PC with an iPhone skin looks like) in an article called ‘Apple Bullies Bloggers, Again’.

Apparently Apple is sending cease and desist letters not only to the writer of the skin, but bloggers who are reporting the issue.

Naturally, Apple’s graphics and icons are copyright to Apple, and should not be copied by anyone. But in the era of the Internet, it’ll be a game of cat and mouse as Apple orders the software to be removed from one site, only to have it appear on another, and Apple’s lawyers ask that it be removed again. Lather, wash, rinse. Repeat.

It’s a little bit like Youtube and consumers continually uploading copyrighted content after Youtube has removed it. Until there is a way to definitively stop something from being uploaded, or being filtered accurately each time after uploading, figuring out how to stop protected content from appearing on the Internet is a battle that no-one has the answers to yet.

One thing’s for sure: this development has only increased the already sky-high interest in the iPhone, with Apple’s lawyers only helping to spread the word about this illegal iPhone skin even faster than otherwise. But what else could Apple do? Word would have spread, whether Apple acted or not.

What else is in store for us all in the continuing saga of the Apple iPhone? With the launch, Steve Jobs has opened iPandora’s box, and as always, it looks like it can never be iClosed.