Apple Wins Permanent Injunction Against Psystar

[KnightWRX]

Speaking of Darwin... I'm a BSD guy, have been for years. That's what eventually made a Mac "okay" in my book and I bought my first mac about 3 years ago. I have a hard time condemning a company for "stealing" code or an idea from the open source community and selling it (the hakintosh projects), when the core of Apple's OS is based on something "free". Granted they're well within their right to do so due to the open source licensing... but I still think it's got a slight bit of pot calling the kettle black going on.

Mike

What are you blabbering about ?

OS X is not open source. The OS X distribution is very much under copyright to Apple and is distributed as a closed source ecosystem. They have the right to impose any of the restrictions they want, and if you're such a BSD guy, you probably also know that their business model is the old "Big-iron Unix" business model. The software is there to push the hardware sales. Your software runs on HP-UX, so you buy a RX7640. Your software is Solaris based ? You buy a T5140. Your software is OS X based ? Well you buy a Mac.

The portions that are open source, Apple very much respects the different open source licenses. They contribute code back to the community and even have a website dedicated to it :

http://opensource.apple.com/

Now, compare all of this to what Psystar is doing. Psystar is trying to be the next Power Computing, except without Apple's blessing. I don't see no pot or kettle being called black here. On one side, we have a community engaged, license respecting company that values IP rights and act within their rights and on the other we have some rogue company that stole some GPL software to make their Rebel EFI product and doesn't mind breaking a EULA to sell a few systems without even purchasing licenses to the OS.

Now, there is a reason Steve Jobs' first act as temporary CEO of Apple in 1998 was to close down the operations of the different clone makers like Power Computer : they were killing what was left of Apple Computers Inc.

So a company trying to do the same was essentially trying to do the same thing, kill Apple. That would mean no more OS X. Good riddance Psystar.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

I really hope all their work was GPL'd or open-sourced.

They contributed a lot to the community.

You don't need to have purchased a Psystar computer to have Psystar's code in your system!

Really? They stole a lot of code from the Hackintosh community.

 

[gnasher729]

I really hope all their work was GPL'd or open-sourced.

They contributed a lot to the community.

You don't need to have purchased a Psystar computer to have Psystar's code in your system!

In reality, Psystar didn't contribute to anything. Everything they did was taken from x86.org without attribution or recognition, and most definitely against the express wishes of some people who wrote the real code.

Rebel EFI has possibly a worse history. Half of it doesn't work, and historically problems were fixed only after the x86.org community fixed a problem and then the result was ripped off. People who complained about it were then threatened with lawsuits, and while a company like Psystar can just close down if they can't pay the cost of a lawsuit, individuals can't do that.

 

[gohanmzt]

100% agree with you. Though there are a number of people on this forum who have been insinuating that Apple may go after people who run a hackintosh, so even though Apple probably could not care lesss, these individuals are happy to jump on their high horses, and point out that running OS X on anything but a mac is illegal.

Frankly no company has the right to make computers running OS X, and therefore make a profit, as for individuals, they can do what they like with the copy they bought.

Actually, if you install OSX in a "non-apple" computer you ARE breaking the license contract that you MUST agree to to install it. If Apple decides not to do anything about it it doesn't make it less illegal (not criminal, but illegal nevertheless).

 

[gohanmzt]

WRONG!!!

It may seem like you 'bought' the software but you haven't. You bought the physical media but the software on the disk is licensed to you and is subject to the EULA. Apple gets to decide what you can do with that software, what machines you can legally install it on and whether you can modify it or not. You might not like it but this is fairly well decided law.

Sad (for some) but true.

 

[Mark Booth]

Anyone with any level of common sense knew months ago this is where this was heading. All you whining ladies that hate the "evil Apple" need to learn to suck it up and get on with your lives.

Now, hopefully, we can get to the juice of this matter. WHO is the big money behind Psystar? They really don't want us to know, which makes it all that much more interesting to know!

Mark

 

[synth3tik]

I can't believe some of you condemn Psystar for offering hackintosh computers, but then defend X86.org who's code psystar used. Then on top of that you want to cry that Psystar didn't give recognition to X86.org.

Really?

Kind of a double standard don't you think? YAY X86, BOO Psystar?

 

[jamesryanbell]

I can't believe some of you condemn Psystar for offering hackintosh computers, but then defend X86.org who's code psystar used. Then on top of that you want to cry that Psystar didn't give recognition to X86.org.

Really?

Kind of a double standard don't you think? YAY X86, BOO Psystar?

LOL!! I was about to post the same thing.

 

[Byrnes3969]

And you "know" all this stuff you're regurgitating about personal and non-public events how? Were you there? Did you watch Wozniak do all the work while Jobs stood around or went to lunch? Or is it just a case where you believe everything someone without an editor posts on the web.

No fanboy, read, http://www.woz.org/letters/general/91.html

 

[bitWrangler]

In turn you defeated yourself. This is the same as Sony Pictures saying that the movie you rented (in your argument) can only be played on a Sony branded DVD player.

So why couldn't they do this if they wanted? They could foreseeably come out with a "bluray" only release. The only thing stopping Sony is common sense, they would have to be certain that the amount of revenue lost in limiting such a release would be countered by folks going out and buying a Sony/bluray player just to play the media, and those numbers are not likely to work out any time soon (though they are getting better with the increase in sales of large screen tv's).

As always, if you don't like their license terms, don't buy their product.

 

[mingoglia]

Atari DID enter the computer business. Did you ever hear of the Atari 400 or 800? Atari COULD have sued Apple but chose not to.

I have an Atari 400 (may be the 800) in my attic. It has a big sticker on the box that says, "Now with 48k of RAM!!!". Okay, back on topic.

 

[Bill&Rose]

I disagree with this analogy.
Because one can use OS X on their own hackintosh if they so choose, but if one started selling those hackintoshes in order to profit, ala Psystar, this is where the problems of intellectual property arise.

Wrong, just because you are not selling the system does not make it legal for you to do the same thing Psystar was doing.

I do not agree with the ruling by the way. Apple charges a good sum for their software, don't try to use how cheap this last upgrade version was, because this should have been free as it was nothing more then a bunch of upgrades that brought it up to 64 bit tech.

If anything Apple cheated all of us by charging for this upgrade and patch version that still was not right and had to have a patch released within its first two weeks of release.

Apple normally charges over 100 dollars for a copy of their software, gee not to far off of what Microsoft charges for a copy of Windows.

You fan boys are only painting yourself into a corner of higher prices for under performing equipment from Apple.

 

[pdjudd]

Now, hopefully, we can get to the juice of this matter. WHO is the big money behind Psystar? They really don't want us to know, which makes it all that much more interesting to know!

Mark

Psystar already revealed its debtors months ago when they tried to file for Bankruptcy. Nothing amazing showed up there. If there were any other backers, Psystar would be in big trouble if they failed to identify them back then. In reality, their finances are nothing spectacular and are no more than what your typical entrepreneur has for a business the size of Psystar. The only outstanding thing is their legal activity's which can easily be explained as follows: Pro bono or pay on win. Lawyers frequently will represent people as idiotic as Psystar for little to no money down in the hopes of a settlement percentage.

There is no evidence that this is simply the case of someone with lots of loans getting a legal team to take nothing on initially. We do know that Psystar was trying to get investors based on promising huge sales, but as far as I can tell that never went anywhere.

This case requires no mysterious backers. Any suggestion by Apple was simply insurance in the initial phases to cast a wide net when it was clear that Psystar was keen on delay tactics. Thats it. My guess is that there are no backers.

 

[pdjudd]

Apple normally charges over 100 dollars for a copy of their software, gee not to far off of what Microsoft charges for a copy of Windows.

No, All the full version copies of Windows starts at at least 200 bucks and goes up from there. OEM copies don't count since Apple does not sell OEM licenses of their OS. True their upgrade copies are cheaper, but that's exactly what Apple licenses - upgrades.

 

[gohanmzt]

I can't believe some of you condemn Psystar for offering hackintosh computers, but then defend X86.org who's code psystar used. Then on top of that you want to cry that Psystar didn't give recognition to X86.org.

Really?

Kind of a double standard don't you think? YAY X86, BOO Psystar?

I think the problem is that osx86.org does not try to make a business out of selling code or computers with OSX preinstalled, it's more of an educational outlet. It's the principle that Psystar violated. Like I said, if you're an individual doing it for fun or for learning purposes, it's still illegal but not warrant for Apple to go after you (yet) as long as you don't try to make a living out of it.

 

[Bill&Rose]

100% agree with you. Though there are a number of people on this forum who have been insinuating that Apple may go after people who run a hackintosh, so even though Apple probably could not care lesss, these individuals are happy to jump on their high horses, and point out that running OS X on anything but a mac is illegal.

Frankly no company has the right to make computers running OS X, and therefore make a profit, as for individuals, they can do what they like with the copy they bought.

Wrong again, read the license, you may need to take remedial reading.

 

[pdjudd]

No fanboy, read, http://www.woz.org/letters/general/91.html

I like this part, from Woz:

I was hurt in later years when I heard that Steve was paid more than he'd told me, and I don't think that I hurt easily. But it was a long time ago and I prefer to get away from it. Steve has always been a good friend to me in many ways more than just palling around. It's so ancient that maybe it didn't happen, and maybe the Atari people that said it and wrote it were wrong in their own memories. I do believe that this is possible. Also, if my own self, or my own children, or my own friends did such a thing in their life, it's easy to excuse it if the circumstances were as I described. It's not 'necessarily' akin to stealing. If there was some dishonesty, I'm over that. Who hasn't done some things that would be considered bad, anyway? I doubt that I'd find such a person interesting.

Emphasis mine. Its ancient history to him.

 

[Hirth]

The content-creator having no control over the use and distribution of their content??

Seriously? Wow. Your tone would change pretty quick if you were a content-creator and depended on the integrity of IP law in order to make a living. The same laws you hate also protect the "little guy."

Of course, when all else fails, just call the law wrong and unjust and move on.

By the way, that cookbook has terms and conditions governing its resale and the use of the materials therein. All books have this.

Whoa. One moment, please. I said absolutely nothing about distribution. When I read a book I am not distributing that book. When a computer runs a program, it is not distributing it.

The law is wrong and unjust. This is my opinion. It is every bit as valid as those who think the law is perfectly just and fine.

In my opinion when I walk into a store and buy a box containing some media with bits on it, then I should own that copy of those bits and be able to do whatever the heck I want with those bits short of duplicating them and distributing them to others. Copyright makes sense to me as an incentive to produce creative works and be able to have a limited monopoly for a time over the copying and distribution of those works. However, how an end-user USES a copyrighted work is no ones business but the end user's. No entity has any, inherent moral right to interfere with that, unless the use itself is immoral. (Extreme examples: using a gun to commit murder, or using a software program to defraud someone.)

I should be legally able to use any technical means to use any hardware with any software. I should be legally able to use any technical means available to use any two pieces of hardware together. The use of any technical or legal means to prevent the use of arbitrary hardware and software together should be prohibited by law.

I believe in obeying the law. I also believe in getting laws that are unjust or immoral changed through legal means.

Does my position limit the power creators have over their work? Yes. Does it limit them on how much they may benefit financially from their work? Yes. Does having copyrights that last over a century limit how much creative works can benefit the society as a whole? Absolutely. Does is limit further creativity by preventing the timely enrichment of the public domain. Absolutely.

The purpose of IP rights is not so that individuals can benefit from their creativity without limit. It is to grant them limited benefit from their creativity for a limited period of time as an incentive so that people will make creative works, which will benefit society as a whole. In our present society these goals have been grossly perverted to perpetuate strangleholds on creative works that are harming the public good.

The pendulum has been swinging for too long in one direction.

In my opinion, a company like PyStar should be allowed to do what they did. It should be legal to do. It should be illegal to attempt to stop them. The laws should be changed so that this is so.

In my opinion, a company like Palm should be allowed to do what they did. It should be legal to do. It should be illegal to attempt to stop them. The laws should be changed so that this is so.

It should be illegal for a company to deliberately break compatibility between software and hardware in their next version. They should be under no obligation to make sure that compatibility is maintained, but any intent to make changes solely to make it so that their own hardware and software no longer works with a third party's (or works worse, see the recent FTC filing against Intel). The intent matters.

 

[mingoglia]

What are you blabbering about ?

OS X is not open source. The OS X distribution is very much under copyright to Apple and is distributed as a closed source ecosystem. They have the right to impose any of the restrictions they want, and if you're such a BSD guy, you probably also know that their business model is the old "Big-iron Unix" business model. The software is there to push the hardware sales. Your software runs on HP-UX, so you buy a RX7640. Your software is Solaris based ? You buy a T5140. Your software is OS X based ? Well you buy a Mac.

The portions that are open source, Apple very much respects the different open source licenses. They contribute code back to the community and even have a website dedicated to it :

http://opensource.apple.com/

Now, compare all of this to what Psystar is doing. Psystar is trying to be the next Power Computing, except without Apple's blessing. I don't see no pot or kettle being called black here. On one side, we have a community engaged, license respecting company that values IP rights and act within their rights and on the other we have some rogue company that stole some GPL software to make their Rebel EFI product and doesn't mind breaking a EULA to sell a few systems without even purchasing licenses to the OS.

Now, there is a reason Steve Jobs' first act as temporary CEO of Apple in 1998 was to close down the operations of the different clone makers like Power Computer : they were killing what was left of Apple Computers Inc.

So a company trying to do the same was essentially trying to do the same thing, kill Apple. That would mean no more OS X. Good riddance Psystar.

The post was a response to the comment about how Psystar was piggy backing their company on the efforts of the folks involved with the hackintosh project and turning a profit. Apple piggy backed on the efforts of the open source community that has created the x86 version of BSD and others and is selling a commercial product built on top of it... turning a (massive) profit. OSX licensing aside, I wanted to point that fact out. It's well within their (Apple) right to do this, but I wanted to make the point that it's not uncommon (in fact it's typically encouraged) to take open source and make it your own. OSX would not be what it is today without the open source community. The large number of network/systems engineers (like myself) and software developers only considered it a viable OS because of the UNIX underpinnings. If it wasn't for the underpinnings it would still be an operating system catering to the typical end user and "artsy" graphics guys.

 

[Hirth]

I would say that you haven't thought that through.

If ten years ago a law had been passed that no company has the right to restrict use of its software to its own hardware, then you still wouldn't be able to use MacOS X on a Dell computer. You know why? Because Apple wouldn't have bought a pre-alpha version of MacOS X for $400 million and spent over a billion dollars to make it what it is today. Instead, Apple would be a mediocre PC maker selling PCs not with Windows 7, but with Windows 3.7 or 3.8 if you're lucky, just like everyone else.

You are entitled to your belief that this would be the case.

Perhaps a different scenario would have played out and MAC OS would be the dominant OS in the world today.

Without actually being able to test either hypothesis, I cannot say which is more likely.

What I have thought through is that the way things are now and the way we are going, it appears we are heading toward more and more control of our lives by big corporations and governments, with more and more restrictions on what I see as essential individual freedoms and liberties.

Of course, this is also speculation, and others will see things differently and draw their own conclusions.

 

[gohanmzt]

... If it wasn't for the underpinnings it would still be an operating system catering to the typical end user and "artsy" graphics guys.

Hey! What's wrong with being an "artsy" graphics guy?

 

[Hirth]

WRONG!!!

It may seem like you 'bought' the software but you haven't. You bought the physical media but the software on the disk is licensed to you and is subject to the EULA. Apple gets to decide what you can do with that software, what machines you can legally install it on and whether you can modify it or not. You might not like it but this is fairly well decided law.

This may be the way it is in law, but it is not the way things should be. When I buy that software program, the ownership of that copy of the software should be mine, to use as I see fit, on the computer I choose, with no interference from the software maker or distributor. I should, at some future time, be able to stop using that software and sell the copy I bought to a third party, again with no restrictions. The laws need changing.

 

[hwhalers]

The pendulum has been swinging for too long in one direction.

Indeed it has. I agree with essentially everything you say in principle, but a lot of it is not realistic in the current state of things.

The problem is that all the prior attempts to modernize contract and copyright law have been written by media lobbyists. This will continue to happen, however, so we're kinda screwed no matter what. At least in the US there hasn't been a push for an individual 'digital bill of rights'. And until that happens there will not be any advancement in individual users' rights. Civil and criminal law needs to concentrate on the heavy threats: Counterfeiters, Patent Trolling, and P2P, as opposed to non-threats: media backup, the storage and use of purchased content in whatever format/media you decide, and hobbyist modifications.

Are copyright terms too long? Yes. Is the DMCA unreasonably restrictive in a lot of ways? Yes. Can corporations unreasonably control what you do with things you've purchased? Yes. Is any of it going to change in the current climate? No. I say this as a semi-professional software developer and artist, who wouldn't mind one day making a living off of either or both of those endeavours. Current IP law can, in a lot of ways, screw a small player. Ever seen how much it costs to have a Blu-Ray disc pressed? It's unreasonable for an independent film maker, in no small part due to Sony's AACS requirements. At the same time, copyright anarchy would serve no one. The happy medium has not been reached, and there's no signs we'll reach it soon.

 

[maxp1]

Whoa. One moment, please. I said absolutely nothing about distribution. When I read a book I am not distributing that book. When a computer runs a program, it is not distributing it.

...

In my opinion when I walk into a store and buy a box containing some media with bits on it, then I should own that copy of those bits and be able to do whatever the heck I want with those bits short of duplicating them and distributing them to others.

So here is the problem with your argument. You buy the physical media with the bits, which you own. But in order for those bits to be useful as a computer program you have to copy them onto your computer. You are distributing those bits when you create a copy of them on your computer. And it is that copying that creates the control that the copyright holder has over the program that you're running.

Sure, you might argue that it's immoral and wrong in any of a dozen ways. But there are just as good arguments that it's right and just and protects the holders of copyright from others stealing their work.

 

[MacFly123]

They tried that before, but bankruptcy required Psystar to reveal all of its backers, so somehow it reversed out of bankruptcy.

It will be interesting to find out who the financial backers were. When will we find this out?

I would also like to know! However I bet the next thing that is coming is bankruptcy coming the Psystar.

No idea 'ay? They had millions though... enough to mount some pretty high-level court cases across multiple states, and also to keep manufacturing, marketing and presumably selling machines (despite not making a cent from their company.)

My guess is that somebody must have helped them...

They have conspiracy written all over them!

But honestly, I would NOT be surprised AT ALL if them and this whole fiasco was funded and orchestrated by Microsoft or one of the huge tech companies! We will probably never know, especially since it is probably true lol!

EAT IT YOU DIRTY BIOTCHES!