Apple v BlueWiki. BluWiki wins.
p2pnet news view Open Source | P2P:- “Imagine a world where everyone can publish online. Without censoring, popups, or banner ads. And you wouldn’t even have to know html! Thats right, just good old-fashioned publishing. Help us accomplish this vision, make BluWiki your home on the web.”
That’s the intro on BluWiki. And now bully company Apple has had to abandon its efforts to muscle it into submission.
Apple told Bluwiki’s Sam Odio (right) to, remove postings that talked about ways to work around a special Apple file, known as iTunesDB,” p2pnet reported last December.
“Apple said copyright law prohibited such talk.”
Riiiight.
But following the EFF’s involvement, Apple has now had to stop bullying Odio.
The David v Goliath fight involved a set of anonymously authored wiki pages in which hobbyists were discussing how to sync media to iPods and iPhones using music library playback software other than iTunes, explains the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), going on »»»
In November 2008, Apple sent a series of legal threats to the operator of Bluwiki, alleging that these hobbyist discussions about interoperability violated copyright law and constituted a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), even though the author(s) of the pages had not yet figured out how to accomplish their goal. In response to Apple’s legal threats, Bluwiki took down the wiki pages in question. In April 2009, EFF and the San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest sued Apple on behalf of OdioWorks, which runs Bluwiki, asking a court to reject Apple’s claims and allow Bluwiki to restore the discussions.
On July 8, 2009, Apple sent letter withdrawing its cease-and-desist demands and stating that “Apple no longer has, nor will it have in the future, any objection to the publication of the iTunesDB Pages.”
The EFF has, in turn, moved to dismiss its complaint against Apple.
But the kettle may continue to boil
“While we are glad that Apple retracted its baseless legal threats, we are disappointed that it only came after 7 months of censorship and a lawsuit,” says the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann, adding:
“Because Apple continues to use technical measures to lock iPod Touch and iPhone owners into — and Palm Pre owners out of — using Apple’s iTunes software, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more discussions among frustrated customers about reverse engineering Apple products.”
Stay tuned.
p2pnet – Apple: muscling the small guys, December 4, 2008
EFF – Apple Withdraws Threats Against Wiki Site, July 22, 2009
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July 23rd, 2009 at 8:45 pm
and that’s why i don’t use itunes, or mac, or an ipod.