
Sam Odio and the EFF vs. Apple Inc. - rms
http://eff.org/press/archives/2009/04/27
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zhyder
I hate that Apple is turning me into a hypocrite. I keep condoning their acts
of bullying just because I like their shiny products. Any other company and I
would have stopped funding it by now.

~~~
jrandom
It pains me as well (I'll be getting a nice, shiny 8-core system in two
months) but rationalize it with my realization that pretty much every company
is evil -- I give my hard-earned paycheck to the least evil company that
provides what I'm looking for.

~~~
zackattack
Can you humor me and define your terms? What makes a company evil?

~~~
sfk
Frivolous abuse of the DMCA in order to suppress reverse engineering for
interoperability purposes?

~~~
zackattack
So evil means suppressing reverse engineering? Any company that suppresses
reverse engineering is evil?

~~~
wolverian
Classic strawman.

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GHFigs
Setting aside the glittering rhetoric of the press release for a moment...

Apple's specific claims are that posting disassemblies from their binaries
(specifically, the memcpy() from the FairPlay DRM library) constitutes both
circumvention of their DRM and infringement of their copyright on that code.

It is hard to argue that the former is not covered by the DMCA. The EFF has
chosen the strange route of hammering on about the unencrypted iTunesDB file,
as if Apple were claiming that _it_ was the content that FairPlay is meant to
protect. It's arguing intent vs. content. The intent might have been to
reverse engineer the iTunesDB file, but the content that Apple is complaining
about is relevant FairPlay.

The latter part is important as the DMCA's exception for reverse engineering,
1201(f), is only applicable if you don't infringe on copyright in the process.
Here, the EFF is arguing fair use and _de minimis_. Without knowing how much
code was posted (the letter from Apple's lawyer says "nearly nine pages",
while the EFF's says "snippets"), it's hard to say what luck they'll have with
that.

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danbmil99
Go, Sammy, Go!!!

Seriously dude, great coup getting EFF involved. Long live the proletariat!

~~~
daveambrose
Good luck Sam!

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ivankirigin
Does anyone know of any other cases of DMCA take-downs for this kind of
content about Apple products, and how it turned out?

~~~
duskwuff
A number of programs which broke the iTunes DRM have received similar takedown
notices. I'm not aware of any attempts to contest the takedowns, which is
probably because they were completely justified. :)

My understanding, based on what I saw of the relevant pages before they got
taken down, is that BluWiki got a takedown because their users were (possibly
inadvertently?) attempting to reverse-engineer an encrypted metadata database
on the iPod which used the exact same format as the FairPlay key database on
the computer.

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dannyr
Go Sam!

