Apple Loses Copyright Claims in Lawsuit Against Corellium

[Eorlas]

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

wondering where everyone is who laughs at jailbreakers and security researchers, and said this was a slam dunk case for apple.

lololololol

 

[Benjamin Nabulsi]

Whenever I read such a case the first thing it comes to my mind is that the court might not fully understood the case. Meanwhile, Apple lawyers are pulling their hair.

 

[Kabeyun]

Apple will appeal and may win on appeal.

So apple got caught lying

Um, what?

 

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

Holy smokes!!!

 

[williamyx]

W for security research

 

[insoft.uk]

Apple will take it higher up and win, very dangerous to allow this.
Will lead to others copying other intellectual property code and design, free Windows 10 anyone or free macOS that can run on any intel or arm based laptop

 

[GiantKiwi]

Most of what you said in this post is patently wrong. Including but not limited to:

Posting a 15 second clip...is fair use
Reverse engineering is fair use
Copyright doesn’t protect algorithms

There is so much nuance in those blanket statements.

Nuance luckily means sweet F all in law.

 

[itsmeaustend]

Where in the world are you getting that?

Delusion lol

 

[69Mustang]

Did Corellium design this OS for finding security problems in Apple's OS or to make money selling an Apple OS clone ?

Selling an Apple OS clone? What does that even mean? Their virtualization tools seem to be what they claim them to be. Apple's biggest issue with Corellium seems to be that Corellium doesn't require it's customers to report the found bugs to Apple. The relationship between Apple and Corellium was rumored to be quite cozy according to reports like this one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...-bites-back-at-apple-lawyers/?sh=38414c9115f0

 

[icanhazmac]

Holy smokes!!!

Holy smokes what? Looks like you forgot to add actual content to your post, again.

 

[AppleTO]

Corellium's software does indeed create digital replicas of iOS, iTunes, and user interface elements available on a web-based platform or custom platform built by Corellium, with the software posed as an exact copy of iOS to allow security researchers to locate bugs.

I’ve seen articles on this before but I’ve never really understand this. So, this company re-created iOS using identical source code? How would they know the exact source code Apple uses and every time an Apple programmer commits a change to it?

If the source code isn’t exactly identical, how would their ‘functions similarly visually but has different source code behind’ possibly help security researchers?

 

[mannyvel]

This was pretty unexpected, especially since fair use for commercial purposes is a bit of a different beast. Let's see how that holds up on appeal.

 

[now i see it]

man the control freak mindset of this company is epic

 

[imnotarobot]

If they simply copied the entire content of an iPhone claiming you can find security issues with this clone, which would be required, then I fail to see how this is fair use. Fair use is a part of the whole; you can show part of a film to review it, but you can't sell a copy of a film for profit and call it fair use. I expect it will be killed on appeal.

 

[cmaier]

I’ve seen articles on this before but I’ve never really understand this. So, this company re-created iOS using identical source code? How would they know the exact source code Apple uses and every time an Apple programmer commits a change to it?

If the source code isn’t exactly identical, how would their ‘functions similarly visually but has different source code behind’ possibly help security researchers?

not source code. Object code. It virtualizes it.

 

[Davidglenn]

If a code is hidden, then somebody writes code to unlock the hidden code. Make that hidden available on their program that is legal. That is a very interesting interpretation of law.

 

[Maconplasma]

So apple got caught lying

According to you they sure did. BTW would you mind telling us what they lied about? 🙄

 

[mrkite77]

Apple has also said that Corellium circumvented Apple's security measures to create its software and violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that claim has not been tossed out.

It will be. The DMCA has explicit exceptions for interoperability. You can violate the DMCA all you want as long as it's necessary for software to work.

 

[vladi]

Very true especially when the latest bill signed by Trump makes copying any copyrighted material a FEDERAL Crime. This was put in by Hollywood/Music biz to stop unauthorised streaming but also effectively stops people posting anything on social media that has a song or image that is copyrighted to others. No more TikTok posts to Taylor Swift warbles. Do that and you go to jail, federal jail.
Yes, it is unenforceable for the masses but...

Piracy has always been a federal crime, VHS era had that covered perfectly clear

What's been signed into bill now is that you don't have to go to federal court to sue someone for copyright, you can do it in small claim court.

 

[mrkite77]

I fail to see the fair use of just copying everything. Copyright doesn’t make any sense if anyone can just copy a work.

The whole concept of fair use is dependent on how it's used, not how much is copied. If a newspaper does an article about the Mona Lisa and includes a photo of it in the article, is that copyright infringement? The entire Mona Lisa is visible. (This is just an example that's easily visualized, the Mona Lisa isn't actually under copyright anymore)

 

[kc9hzn]

As an IP attorney, I think this is a good ruling. Fair use is often not considered by internet companies so the public thinks it's not real. (For instance, posting a 15 second clip of your child dancing to music is fair use of the music, but You Tube will often take it down).

Reverse engineering is fair use.

Copyright protects creative expression, not facts or algorithms. The less creativity the less the protection. Thus, code is mostly the province of patents, not copyrights, and the court shouldn't give wide copyright protection.

Reverse engineering is fair use, but it’s not clear that this is strictly speaking reverse engineering. As a matter of fact, Corellium‘s own statements and marketing suggest it’s not a reverse engineered version of iOS but actually iOS itself running in a cloud environment (otherwise, it would have no value for security research, for instance, because it would have different bugs than iOS). They might have reverse engineered some aspects of the boot process to get iOS to boot in a virtualized environment, but it seems like it’s copyrighted userland code running unmodified. Second, as I understand it (though I am not a lawyer in general, let alone an IP lawyer), it’s considerably harder for commercial use to be considered fair use than for similar non-commercial use. It sounds like this is a commercial product. That said, most judges really aren’t the best people to make copyright decisions about software/hardware or other technical issues in general, because they’re not technology specialists. (They usually understand technology about as well as stereotypical grandparents or the writers of shows like CSI.)

 

[vipergts2207]

The whole concept of fair use is dependent on how it's used, not how much is copied. If a newspaper does an article about the Mona Lisa and includes a photo of it in the article, is that copyright infringement? The entire Mona Lisa is visible. (This is just an example that's easily visualized, the Mona Lisa isn't actually under copyright anymore)

Yeah I feel like there’s a lot of people talking about things they don’t understand in the least here. Got a lot of intellectual property lawyers here apparently.

 

[brand]

Most of what you said in this post is patently wrong. Including but not limited to:

Posting a 15 second clip...is fair use
Reverse engineering is fair use
Copyright doesn’t protect algorithms

There is so much nuance in those blanket statements.

He never said that he was a good IP attorney.

 

[Scipster]

This is outrageous! The judge fails to recognize the alternate reality that Corellium is in fact infringing on Apple's copyright on the basis that Apple says so and what Apple says goes. Apple needs to #StopTheSteal lol

In all fairness, it may be that Corellium can claim fair use as their product is mainly virtualization and the code is used for research and educational purposes, but the judge/jury is still out on the DCMA claim. Curious to see how it all plays out.

 

[chucker23n1]

This case continues to confound me. What happened here, exactly?

Did Corellium crack copy protection to run iOS on a VM? That would make sense in terms of security research, but this keeps taking about a “copy” and a replica.

Did Corellium make an OS that’s bug-for-bug-compatible with iOS, i.e. a “replica”? No they didn’t. That’d take absurd amounts of engineering effort, and they’d always be catching up.

Did they reverse-engineer portions, to be similar? Maybe, but that wouldn’t be useful for security research, unless to research the security of high-level apps, maybe?