BluWiki Sues Apple
Here’s a high-tech twist on the ‘man bites dog’ story. Having launched many legal actions against Web sites and bloggers in the past in order to protect details on its products, is now being sued by the operator of a Wiki site dedicated to iTunes workarounds.
It started when a group of users of the BluWiki site began swapping notes on how to get their iPods and iPhones working with software other than Apple’s own iTunes, such as the popular WinAmp and open-source Songbird.
Apple’s lawyers contacted OdioWorks, which runs the BluWiki site, with one of their boilerplate take-down letters demanding the content be removed citing alleged breaches of copyright infringement and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. OdioWorks complied, and then kick-started legal action against Apple to retract its threat and allow the non-commercial wiki site to restore the threads.
“I take the free speech rights of BluWiki users seriously” said Sam Odio, owner of OdioWorks. “Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussions.”
The suit has been filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), with staff attorney Fred von Lohmann claiming that “Apple’s legal threats against BluWiki are about censorship, not about protecting their legitimate copyright interests.”
“Wikis and other community sites are home to many vibrant discussions among hobbyists and tinkerers. It’s legal to engage in reverse engineering in order to create a competing product, it’s legal to talk about reverse engineering, and it’s legal for a public wiki to host those discussions.”
Source: APC MAG
Serves them right. What goes around comes around.
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September 1st, 2009 at 7:35 am
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