Apple sued over BluWiki legal threats
By Ronald O Carlson
An open source effort to work around (hack) Apple’s iTunes + iPod + iPhone lock-ins has been the subject of repeated threats from Apple’s legal team. Now, the company that hosted the forum at the center of the controversy is fighting back and, assuming the case ever gets to court, could make it a defining moment in the fight against digital rights management (DRM) and the more egregious applications of the copyright law.
The Bluwiki forum and hosted by OdioWorks has been home to discussions regarding the development and use of software other than iTunes to manage an iPod or iPhone. Apple has responded by threatening legal action, saying that even talking about such things is a threat to their DRM and violation of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), which led OdioWorks to take the forum down.
Now, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (court filings, .pdf) and News.com, OdioWorks is fighting back and has sued Apple so it can again host the forum without worrying about getting sued. The case pits the first amendment rights of forum posters against the DCMA’s prohibition against reverse engineering digital copy protections.
Courts have ruled many times that reverse engineering and discussions thereof are legal. The DMCA subverts that by barring this application of fair use as it relates to software, or at that’s the most sense I can make of it.
Sooner or later the more thuggish elements of the DCMA will be struck down, because any distinction between hacking digital and physical things is fundamentally false and it’s been show many, many times that such reverse engineering is of great value to society. I simply wish we could get to the end game here as quickly as possible.
Still, it’s hard to imagine exactly what a final solution will look like as law enforcement is neither able nor willing to take on the challenge…
What’s your take?
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