"Assuming they pay Apple for every copy they sell..."
D'ya think this may be the little hitch in your argument? By
what mechanism exactly do you see Apple accepting
money from a company that is aggressively violating their
license? This improbability can only occur if the other
improbability occurs first, that is, they choose to pay,
which also isn't going to happen.
Pystar claims they can do this because of Apple monopoly
status?. That's the first I've heard of Apple's monopoly
status. Were you aware of antitrust action against Apple?
What kind of bunk is this from ZDNet?
I think I know. The PC ecosystem that has owed IT a living
for all these years is starting to dissolve and the
alternatives are not amenable to another open architecture
circle jerk. But hope springs eternal right?
The Mac clone business had been allowed to happen under
Amelio. It was summarily shut down by Jobs. If it couldn't
have been shut down, it wouldn't have been then. All this
coy talk about legal ambiguity is nothing but a
manifestation of wishful thinking by the IT industry and a
cheap Chinese motherboard maker. Get a grip.
To hear Psystar tell it, they can install MacOS on their own hardware, despits Apple’s end user license agreement to the contrary, because said EULA is an illegal “monopoly.”
“What if Honda said that, after you buy their car, you could only drive it on the roads they said you could?”
But of course, that is no comparison at all, because software is sold under a license (the EULA). Apple’s specifically limits your ability to run MacOS to “Apple-branded computers.”
“What if Microsoft said you could only install Windows on Dell (Dell) computers?” said a Psystar employee.
Well, then, you could only install on Dell, it seems to me. (Although such an requirement would raise antitrust problems. Here, there is only one company, thus no antitrust issue.)
But, it seems, the enforceability of EULAs has never clearly been established. EULAs are essentially a workaround of the first-sale doctrine, which limits copyright protections to the initial transfer from copyright owner to purchaser. Once purchashed, an item is the property of the buyer who can resell as he wishes.
A typical case is found in SoftMan v Adobe (2001) 171 F.Supp.2d 1075 where a company bought one of those bundled software packages and tried to sell the individual software boxes. Adobe argued first-sale didn’t apply because it didn’t sell the package but merely licensed it under an EULA.
But in 1990 Congress gave software publishers relief from the first-sale doctrine, giving copyright owners the right to enforce copyright violations in subsequent sales. Thus under federal law, copyright owners may enforce copyright when you rent or lend software you buy (there’s an exception for libraries and schools.)
In this case, Psystar is reselling Apple’s software. Assuming they are paying Apple for each copy they sell, it’s not clear that Apple can stop them from selling it on hardware as opposed to it a box. “A purchaser of a copy of a copyrighted computer program may still sell his copy to another without the consent of the copyright holder.” (Step-Saver v. Wise (3d Cir, 1991) 939 F.2d 91, 96, n.7.)
In the Adobe case, the district court held that the distinction between sale and license is anachronistic: “software is sold and not licensed.”
So … can Apple control how Psystar distributes its software? Or if they only sell the machine, can they stop users from installing it on their hardware?
It seems that they should be able to … but legally it’s not completely clear to me.
