EFF Sues Apple Over BluWiki Legal Threats 242
Hugh Pickens writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against Apple to defend the First Amendment rights of BluWiki, a noncommercial, public Internet 'wiki' site operated by OdioWorks. Last year, BluWiki users began a discussion about making some Apple iPods and iPhones interoperate with software other than Apple's iTunes. Apple lawyers demanded removal of the content (pdf) sending a letter to OdioWorks, alleging that the discussions constituted copyright infringement and a violation of the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing copy protection measures. Fearing legal action by Apple, OdioWorks took down the discussions from the BluWiki site but has now filed a lawsuit to vindicate its right to restore those discussions (pdf) and seeking a declaratory judgment that the discussions do not violate any of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and do not infringe any copyrights owned by Apple. 'I take the free speech rights of BluWiki users seriously,' said Sam Odio, owner of OdioWorks. 'Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussions.'"
Random BedHead Ed adds ZDNet quotes EFF's Fred von Lohmann, who says that this is an issue of censorship. 'Wikis and other community sites are home to many vibrant discussions among hobbyists and tinkerers. It's legal to engage in reverse engineering in order to create a competing product, it's legal to talk about reverse engineering, and it's legal for a public wiki to host those discussions.'"
!streissandeffect (Score:4, Informative)
No Streissand Effect here, folks.
Re:What's the Story (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's the Story (Score:5, Informative)
I believe this was the project where they were attempting to brute force the key that encrypted the song database on the newer iPhone/Touch firmwares. They did this by requesting everyone upload their own copy of the database off their device.
The purpose in doing this was to enable third party programs to actually sync with the device, since currently the only way to do so is through iTunes (even the third party programs that do so now rely on being able to hook into it's dlls).
Apple hit them with a C&D letter indicating that the project was a viloation of the DMCA, specificly an attempt to bypass DRM.
The question will be, do the courts agree with Apple?
Re:Why does everyone always side with the little g (Score:3, Informative)
Actually the newer songs don't have DRM at all. Of course you're right about older songs that are still encrypted with Fairplay.
The thing is, it's not about the music files anyway. DRM'ed or not, you can move the file around. The problem seems to be the files database itself that's been encrypted.
Reminds me of the old Tengen vs Nintendo case. If I remember corretly, they lost in the USA but won in Canada.
Re:Why do these idiots keep buying iPods (Score:3, Informative)
gtkpod and others using libgpod. Like Amarok and Rythmbox, though support is only preliminary for touch/phone.
They were all knocked back a bit last year when apple suddenly introduced a crypto hash on some of the indexes, but it was reverse engineered. I have yet to hear why there would be any reason at all to cryptographically sign a song index other than to prevent competing software from functioning properly.
And there's the other thing, if Apple had their way, they would shut all of these down. From TFA it looks like they were trying to stop even discussion of this stuff. There is no hard and fast requirement for iTunes except that apple likes to sue people and occasionally try to throw technical hurdles at them. It's just a mass storage device and some index files.
Re:What's the Story (Score:3, Informative)
While I'm a donating EFF member, that reflects my experience with their press releases. Often reading the legal papers themselves (which admittedly are linked from EFF press releases) gives a bit different picture of the situation.
I don't remember many examples now, but one recent one I do. The case where a university student got his computer hardware confiscated allegedly for sending mail to a university mailing list, alleging that his (ex-?)roommate is gay, and posting link to a profile he had allegedly made in some gay site.
I do think that EFF has a case there, demanding that the search warrant be struck retroactively, but please do read the papers and the evidence posted by the authorities. It's not that EFF lies, but the picture it paints by omitting some facts is quite different from the one given even in its own papers, let alone those of the authorities.
I noticed this many times in the DeCSS case years ago too. Admittedly I did think that many of the rulings were quite favorable to EFF (before they to everyone's surprise lost the case), but the press releases painted them in way too rosy terms, relying on carefully selected sentences from the court's orders to paint a picture not really given by the orders themselves.
Groklaw is different. I find PJ's analysis of issues (or at least the rulings) quite balanced. She doesn't try to explain them so it seems the judge agreed with the "good guys" 100%, like the EFF.
Re:"Because it's there" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:First Amendment Apple better KNOCK this (Score:3, Informative)
*sigh* Apple and Microsft aren't equal. In fact, they aren't equally detrimental to the world of computer science. And, it goes beyond scale.
Apple sells physical products, which happen to be preloaded with their own operating systems and software. Apple won't permit anyone to do much of anything with those systems, which apple doesn't approve of. Apple, bad, yeah.
Microsoft sells almost no physical products, instead relying on an established monopoly, created by intimidating manufacturers of computer hardware. Exclusivity agreements barred mfgrs from offering any competing systems on their hardware. By default, everyone in the world bought either MS operating systems, or they bought Apple, or they bought machines with no OS, or they simply bought the parts to build their own no OS systems. There was an enforced virtual MS tax on almost all computers for more than a decade, and many people still pay that tax. (I can find more proofs that MS is evil, but this one is enough to suffice) Microsoft evil.
On the one hand, we have bad. On the other, we have evil. Perhaps the bad boy would LIKE TO BE evil, but we don't know that, and we certainly can't prove it. Bad is bad, but evil trumps bad, every time.