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BusinessWeek’s Burrows: Psystar shouldn’t have messed with Apple

Hammacher Homepage 300x250“Whatever the outcome of Psystar’s ongoing battle, even now the saga carries some important lessons for other would-be challengers to tech’s status quo,” Peter Burrows reports for BusinessWeek. “Don’t pick a legal fight you can’t win (put another way, don’t mess with Apple). The onetime underdog is now one of the staunchest defenders of its intellectual property, and it has a $24 billion cash hoard to help press its case in court.”

MacDailyNews Note: Make that over $34 billion, Pete. $10 billion difference still means something outside of Washington D.C.

Burrows continues, “Mac users want the whole enchilada. The world has changed immensely since Power Computing and the other cloners were trying to build their business. Back then, the Mac customer base was mostly companies and technically sophisticated consumers. Now, the company sells millions of Macs a year, to all manner of consumers. When they head out to buy a computer, they’re not defining the Mac as an operating system. The Mac is a stylish machine that runs a well-designed operating system—and a machine that is backed up by support from a company with one of the world’s strongest brands.”

“Psystar’s attorney, Kiwi Camara of Camara & Sibley in Houston, is hopeful the copyright case in California will be reversed on appeal (the partial settlement stipulates that Psystar won’t have to pay those damages until all appeals have been exhausted). And Camara says Apple’s decision to drop a spate of remaining claims against Psystar—on trademark infringement, unfair competition, and others—shows Apple wants to end this saga as well. ‘This [partial settlement] is too good to be true,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why they did it,'” Burrows reports. “A bigger unknown for Psystar, though, is why its founders decided to take on Apple in the first place.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]

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