“It seems that Apple has grown tired of Apple-clone Psystar and has filed suit against the Florida company at the federal district court for the northern district of California,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reports for ZDNet.
“Apple, Inc., manufacturer of the well known line of computers and software, filed suit on July 3 in the federal district court for the northern district of California against Florida company Psystar, Inc. The suit alleges counts for violation of its shrink wrap license, trademark and copyright infringement,” Kingsley-Hughes reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jimbo von Winskinheimer” for the heads up.]
Gee, wonder who’s gonna win this one?
Um, there’s no OS X without Macs. The main reason why OS X works so well is that it’s optimized for Macs.
“Yup, it’s a dodgy business.”
I thought was Chrysler LLC.
Not surprisingly, http://www.psystar.com is down. They’ve gone to ground.
@Al
If they are forced to license OSX, I have the perfect solution for them.
First spin off the software department, and in preparation for licensing OSX to all who wish to license it.
Second price the licences so high that it would make Apple’s hardware division is a break even company.
Third finaly open the license to all companies that wish to become slaves to their new master.
Under that system it financially doesn’t matter (to Apple shareholders) who makes the hardware, as there ends up being very little profit in it.
I wonder just how lone it be before there web site goes dark… hours or days?
Maybe Apple waited so long because they wanted people to find out for themselves what a steaming pile of crap those Psystar computers are. All they did was hijack the work that Apple put time, effort and money into and slap it into bargain-basement hardware. The poor saps who got suckered into buying those things get what they deserve.
By the way Apple has gotten itself into a nice position… it’s clients are defenting the big guy i.e apple, at the expence of the little guy.
Plus the client pays more cause Apple has no direct competer and that’s a good thing in the minds of the client!
Wonder what M$ would pay to be in Apple shoes about now! <GRIN>
It’s a dangerous game for Apple.
IBM had absolutely no luck defending against PC clones. If Phystar goes the distance, it’s hard to see Apple being successful here. The result could be a court order for Apple to open up Mac OS X.
What’s illegal about what Phystar are doing, running a legally purchased OS on an industry standard computer, which is basically what Apple sells?
What if Microsoft put a clause in their license agreements, that you could only run Windows on hardware vendors approved by Microsoft? Just how well to you think that would stand up in court?
And if Apple do establish the precedent that it’s OK for an OS vendor to control which hardware their OS runs on, Just how long would Apple last if Macs could not run Windows? It would be the beginning of the end for Apple.
@@ Twenty Benson
“The main reason why OS X works so well is that it’s optimized for Macs”
I agree. As us Mac-heads never cease to remind remind anyone who can be bothered to listen… It’s the software, stupid!
But, no doubt Dell would make a much smoother job of running it than Psystar. The interesting question is – what would Apple do if their OS X market-share doubled in a few months?… there would be one hell of a lot of new customers *seriously* pissed off with Apple if they attempted to wreck non-Mac OSX use with a software update.
Monopolists can’t stand when there is competition. That drives down prices and forces them to keep up with technology and compete in the market place. That is what makes the PC market great and why Apple owns maybe 5%. Monopolies steal from consumers and force them to purchase sub-standard equipment at premium prices.
Here is hope that democracy will stand and the judges will not nullify the constitution even when paid off by Apple. Everyone knows Apple can’t live with competition, and using the courts to put companies out of business is the route for loser companies. This looks like SCO suing IBM for the same reasons. Lets hope that Apple goes the same way that SCO went, down the toilet where it belongs.
@Ampar
“Florida company Psystar, Inc. has just filed for a legal name change this morning in federal district court to “Scorched Hole In The Ground” because, “It just made more sense.” Apple attorneys were reportedly seen leaving today in a corporate jet from a Cupertino airfield headed to 10475 NW 28th St., Doral, Florida with 200 lb. bags of salt each.”
Priceless! Funniest thing I’ve read in a while. Thanks.
Apple cannot win this.
They will solve this in the time honoured way, by settling and buying Psystar. The purpose of filing a suit is to start those negotiations.
If I was Apple I’d devise a way to benefit Apple and at the same time give the law-breakers (like iPhone 1.0 jailbreakers) a way to go legit, like giving the cloners the choice of A) shutdown your operation and use your talents to work for us back in Cupertino; or B) Never work again.
@Acquisitions
I don’t think buying Psystar would achieve anything. This is not about a two-bit box maker… what’s being tested by law are a handful of words in Apple’s software licence. If those few words don’t stand up in court… Apple becomes a fundamentally changed company – overnight.
Not looking good for Apple.
@Dangerous game
The diff being that IBM didn’t control the software or (most) of the hardware, they only controlled the BIOS. Other companies reverse-engineered the BIOS but made it sufficiently different to get past the legal stuff and sell anyways.
Psystar isn’t doing that with OSX, they are selling Apple’s software…
I don’t see this forcing Apple to license (the Monopoly card) but I wonder if it will be the lawsuit that breaks the EULA… it may end up that anyone can install OSX and PsyStar can sell it alongside their machines, they just won’t have an OEM license.
You ever notice how people like to add “realist” to their names in an attempt to give their highly debatable (and usually somewhat cynical) opinions more weight? Let’s see if this works:
“Psystar is violating the OS X license, and should rightfully be sued to smithereens. After which Apple should buy the company’s remains and convert them into a toilet paper roll manufacturing division or something. Oh, and Steve should be able to personally destroy any remaining Psystar computers with a sledgehammer, due to their distressing lack of design beauty.”
There, how did that come across? Remember, I’ve got “realist” in my name, so my opinion is better than yours!
Mac Realist,
“Lets hope that Apple goes the same way that SCO went, down the toilet where it belongs.”
Do you need some company down in your sewer,
Shit for Brains?
@Mac Realist –
Your comment is so full of self-contradiction, misinformation, and bad comparisons, there’s not enough space in this forum to begin to explain them all.
Let’s just say your last point is completely off the mark. SCO has no case since no SCO proprietary code ever made it into the open source Linux source code distributed by IBM. Even with the money and might of MSFT behind it, time and again SCO failed to provide one shred of evidence to support its case, despite Torvalds repeated challenge. Last I checked, Psystar is not even an authorized reseller of Mac OS X, never mind installing it on non-Apple hardware and making a profit on top of it without profit sharing with Apple. Psystar’s actions are more akin to say, IBM installing HP-UX on its Unix servers and selling them without HP’s permission.
This has nothing to do with this post…
I found a site with a pic of Wall-E and EVE as the mac vs pc commercial with Wall-E as the PC. If you’ve seen the movie, you KNOW that is some serious bullshit! So the pic was bad enough, the comments were enough for me to say something. Of course I was met with the same “All Mac users are elitist assholes/faggots” argument. If anyone feels the needs to unload on some “PC elitists” head on over here and fire away!
The other reason Apple waited this long, is that they wanted Pystar to sell a small but appreciable number of systems. This has a twofold effect:<ul>
<li>Apple gets triple actual damages for willful infringement. And that’s at Apple’s retail sales price, not what it cost Pystar to make the systems. And the hoot is, that anyone pathetic enough to have bought a Pystar system in the first place would never have shelled out the bucks for say, an iMac, in the first place. Wooot wooot. And with Pystar having to pay that much, it means they will have to fold unless they settle quickly and cleanly.</li>
<li>Apple also sows a nice crop of people who will be burned by theie decision to buy an illegal clone. Those buyers will have NO support and virtually no resale value. They will bitch and moan vocally when the next Pystar comes around, and remind people that by going out on a limb, you can fall, it happened before etc. Nothing like creating a few examples….</li></ul>
Let’s go back before DOS. IBM had a monopoly, and was often described as a benevolent dictator (compared with Microsoft which was just called a dictator).
IBM had their monopoly with their mainframes. They got smacked down and part of the judgement was that their hardware side had to pay full price, the same price non-IBM companies would have to pay, for software, and the same for software. Basically, IBM could not “give” discounts on stuff from one division to another division. Each division had to pay the full market value for stuff from another division, to “level the playing field.”
If this same thing happened to Apple, in the split-the-company scenario above, the software division would have to charge the hardware division the same it would charge Dell or HP for the OSX license to go on said hardware. No cheap discounts to make it all come out in the hardware division’s favor.
I think Apple is taking the right tack with psystar.
Afterall, how hard is it for someone to understand that Apple makes OS X and has created a license for its use? As the company who invented the product, Apple have every right to keep it on machines THEY themselves approve of, or not at all.
And to those constantly droning on about Apple ‘freeing’ OS X – if you want it so much, buy a Mac! What’s the point in demanding something Apple aren’t likely to do? It makes you look like some bitter, envious twit!
You should ask Apple to improve OS X, and not water it down on a mishmash of third party hardware. Don’t you remember how fast Steve shut down the previous cloning attempt, eh?
OS X is, and should be, part of the Apple experience, provided on Apple hardware – on Apple’s TERMS – not psystar’s, not anyone else’s.
The bottom line is, as OS X is an Apple property, Steve has no obligation to some vocal minority who will likely never buy his computers anyway.
And to that, current Mac sales figures speak for themselves, don’t they?
Psystar is nothing more than a front for other companies that want to test the legal waters with Apple without incurring their wrath, or scrutiny from thee press.
This is going to be very interesting and could define the future. Pystar has legal precedent in their favor in that it was recently ruled that a manufacturer cannot stop the computer owner from installing whatever software they want. Pystar is indeed blurring the lines, but if Apple loses it could herald a new era of Apple clones. Apple could foreseeably end up with no choice but to offer legal licenses to 3rd party assemblers. Whether that is good or bad … history will decide. A serious caveat is whether Pystar has enough in their coffers to go into legal battle with Apple without going broke.
Well let’s get one thing clear a few people seem to think that Apple has a Monopoly in something. Apple as no monopoly in anything. Because Apple created and owns Mac OS X (it is their IP and product) you can’t charge the owner of a product or IP with a monopoly of their own product. Mac OS X is a computer OS and Mac OS X does not occupy a monopoly position in the Computer OS Market which is what Apple would have to have. Even if you got the court to agree that the Mac OS X were a Per Se Market unto itself, Then you’d need to show that Apple abused it’s Monopoly Position to artificially drive up the price. (Like for like hardware and software Apple is not price gouging customers and has not conspired to raise prices. So, Apple as made no Anti-Trust violations.
Apple has the right to control, restrict and dictate what hardware it’s OS can legally be run on. Because, 1) Mac OS X is only fully licensed to an Apple hardware Systems (read your licenses agreements) 2) All Retail copies of Mac OS X are purchased as upgrades to a fully licensed copy that is only sold with a New Apple Macintosh computer (read the EULA with a retail copy of Mac OS X). 3) Installing Software upgrades in place of a fully licensed version of software has been a crime and has always been upheld by the courts as a crime from the dawn of the software licenses agreement and upgrades.
If Apple wants to they can end up owning PsyStar.
Attorneys love to use popular culture to try and win long shot cases without ever reviewing the actual laws, in this case the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act.
A Monopoly in and of itself is not illegal nor is it subject to breakup or regulation. You have to objectively ask 1) does Apple have a 95% or greater share in the broader market. 2) is Apple price gouging, is Apple involved in price fixing 3) or other questionable negative market effecting behavior.