July 16th, 2008
Apple (Finally) Sues Mac Clone Maker Psystar
By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
Come on, you had to be expecting this. The question wasn’t if, but when (and perhaps, what was taking so long). Since Psystar opened up its doors in April we’ve been waiting for the hammer to fall, and apparently Apple’s really big hammer fell on July 3rd, with a lawsuit filed.
You can check the court docket history here (.PDF).
The information was first highlighted by Jorge Espinosa’s blog. He’s a lawyer and his firm specializes in:
Trademarks, copyrights, patents and the business of protecting the products of human creativity. Domestic and international litigation and prosecution. Border protection. Internet law.
Figures he’d be interested in this - and that he’d note it.
So, is this the end of Psystar? With Apple’s big legal wallets, one would think so.
LZW says:
Hard to say what their chances are… I think we need a real mac user or someone who knows the beast to comment on this but I’ll give it shot.
I don’t believe apple makes all the parts for MAC and therefor may not have much say over you uses the designs for what. For example, don’t they use intel processors now? Certainly Apple has no right to tell me what I may or may not do with an intel cpu so do they have a right to tell a clone maker?
I believe they are also using the PCI bus now… Yet apple does not own PCI, no single company owns because I think it is a consortium of comapnies…
So what about OSX? I heard they developed it from a version of unix and has per license agreements of such things, they also published a free version called Open Darwin.
It would be interesting to know if this MAC clone ships with the official OSX, Open Darwin, or some other compatible MAC/Unix system. If it ships with OSX, they might be in a world of hurt because that would constitute a resale and you know how microsoft is always suing ebay’ers for selling used computers with windows!
A MAC clone could fall under the same guidelines as a used Windows computer! Although there is no piracy, (they may have legally bought OSX licenses) there may be a resale violation on a restricted license.
They could fight back though because technically that violates the right of resale clause in the consumer protection act.
July 18th, 2008 at 8:17 pm