Apple, Psystar strike deal to avoid trial in Open Computer tussle - Page 4

iTunes+iPod does hold a monopoly status. Their is nothing against the law about being a monopoly if the market has elected your product the best and you do nothing to prevent others from competing in a fair market.

Apple is having problems with its DRM strategy. People are calling Apple anti-competitive because no one else can get their DRM on iPods and Apple will not license Fairplay. Which is not really anti-competitive, Apple has done nothing to prevent other companies from making their own innovative mp3 players.

The situation is actually working in the consumers favor. Because no one can get other DRM on the iPod it forces the market to let go of DRM. If Fairplay became the standard DRM the record labels would live with it forever and make it as restrictive as they possibly could.

Plenty of companies SELL Mac OS X in the box, they do not RESELL.

Drivers? What are those? In the Mac World, users very rarely have to deal with drivers.

You mean like those same venders that won't make Vista drivers for older, but not yet obsolete, hardware. Or those venders that will not make an XP drivers for their new "Vista ready" hardware so you can install XP on a new computer. How about those venders that won't fix their drivers when it knocks out your sound card, network card or modem because they claim it's the other venders fault.


It was a firmware fix on the venders graphics card. I'm sure the vender (ATI) was helping in finding a solution. It took a while (several months) because the problem only occurred on some iMacs. Apple had to find out what these iMacs had in common. And this can't be done until there's a large enough sample size. (I know this doesn't help when you own one of the affected iMac. ) If the problem occurred on all the iMacs, then finding a fix would have been much simpler. It turned out that the problem only arises on a graphic card with a certain firmware along with a certain updated version OSX. And that "simple" firmware fix had to be written in such a way that a person with a good iMac can't install it by accident. Thus creating problems on a good machine.

I know on my Mac I have never encountered that dreaded message I sometimes get when installing a new driver on my old Windows PC. The one that goes ",,,,about to install a newer version of xxx.dll file. Do you want to proceed? or keep the old file?." I know that if I don't install the newer xxx.dll file my new hardware will not work. But if I do install the newer xxx.dll file some other hardware or program might no longer work. That's what happens in an open system where anybody can go in and change things around. Too many cooks spoils the soup.



What do you want Apple to do? Hire a bunch of goons to put Psystar out of business by taking sledge hammers to their inventory. Apple is suing Psystar in a court of law. It's now up to the courts to schedule a trial. This non-binding arbitration may be the fastest way to resolve this issue. Otherwise Apple will have to wait until a trail date is set. If Apple wins Psystar is out of the Mac clone business and may have to pay restitution to Apple for the Mac clones they already sold. Each Mac clone is a violation and can carry a hefty fine.

As for the RIAA, so far they have offered all those that they are suing, for downloading (uploading) music illegally, a $3000 out clause. Pay the RIAA $3000 and they'll drop the suit against you. Otherwise it may cost over $100,000 (plus court fees) if you lose in court. That's not settling or going easy on someone that they know they can nail in court?

BTW- It took the RIAA nearly 2 years to shut Napster down. But I don't see any of the new P2P, that's taken Napster place, shutting down any time soon. And illegal downloading (and uploading) of music hasn't declined much. I guess the RIAA hasn't "create and example that will strike fear" yet. Maybe Jobs shouldn't have hurt their feelings with his "Rip, Mix and Burn slogan.

This "driver problem" happens thousands of times less that on the Windows platform. In fact I have difficulty recalling any DRIVER issues in the past four years (the ATI one being a hardware issue).


Why would Apple go to the expense of a court trial when Psystar has absolutely NOTHING financially to give Apple should Apple win? Not a sound financial idea really.


Again, it's not worth the outlay.

I have read your sig before, and I don't get it. Your sig tells us that Apple is a hardware company, if you're in the know, but the linked article is all about how Mac will definitely NOT move from PowerPC to Intel (this is in 2003). Of course, Apple did move to intel.

That post isn't about Apple's business model, and it's fundamentally wrong anyway. What exactly did you want us to take away from it?

What's the distinction between SELLING in the box and RESELLING in the box?

There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that would currently make it unlawful for me to walk into any store, pay the full price to purchase and take ownership of any object containing copyrighted material, then walk out of the store and RESELL the same, unopened, unmodified, and unduplicated object to the first person I meet on the street, at whatever price we find mutually agreeable - be it $1, or $1000, or five shiny buttons and a piece of string.

An incorporated company has the exact same rights and responsibilities as an individual human being under the law with respect to the purchase, ownership, and sale of property.

Psystar, of course, isn't doing just that.

And I would recommend a Reading 101 class for you.

I'm not sure what your response was supposed to mean, but it bears little similarity to any arguments I've made. My eBay comments were in response to Apple's silly contention that OS X is an upgrade. If that's the case, then that means you cannot legally install OS X purchased off-the-shelf on a Mac bought on eBay with the drive wiped clean and with no OS discs. I've never heard of Apple going after people for doing that. Have you?

I wrote my blog post with the question in mind as two what law Psystar is breaking. I could come up with none.

They sell a PC to a customer (legal.)

They sell a boxed, off-the-shelf copy of OS X (legal.)

They open and install OS X on the PC at the customer's request prior to shipping (legal.)

What law is being broken exactly?

Before Leopard, Apple sold two versions of their OSX. A full install version and an upgrade version. The full install version cost around $179.00. While the upgrade version cost around $129.00. If you had an upgrade version it will not install on a blank drive. (Windows did the same thing with 95, 98 ME and maybe XP.)

I know there were two version of Panther. I have the upgrade version and in order for me to load it on a newly reformatted drive I have to load my copy of Cheetah first (which is a full version).

But I think Tiger in only available in an upgrade version. If you look at the requirement for Tiger it states that you need to have Panther (or earlier) on the drive you're installing it on. If you bought a used Mac on eBay with a blank drive you can not install Tiger without first installing Panther (or any other version of OSX below it.) And it you must use the full install version.

Leopard is a different animal. It is only available as a full version. But for $129.00. Therefore it will install on a blank drive of any compatible Mac.

But regardless, all OSX in the off the shelve box is consider an upgrade. That's because it is only meant to be installed on a Mac. And every new Mac sold came with a version of OSX. So even if the use Mac has a blank drive, Leopard would still be an upgrade of the OSX that originally came with it. Unless of course if you lost or damaged your original Leopard disk that came with your Mac.

Of course I'm talking about the off the shelve OSX here. The OSX on the disc that comes with a Mac will install on a blank drive. Providing it's the on the same model Mac that it came with. Another words, the OSX disc that comes with an iMac will only install on an iMac.


They can not sell a modified version of OSX. The OSX that is pre-loaded on their Mac clone has been modified. It must be return to it's original unaltered state or deleted from the drive before it can be sold.

Read "lfmorrison" post several post up.

It's one thing to modify your own copy of OSX and load it on your own computer. But you can't make a business out of it by advertising and selling PC's with modified version of OSX on it. Even if you include an original off the shelve copy of OSX with each PC. You need a license from Apple Inc. Otherwise you are infringing on some one else's copyrighted IP by modifying it and using as an incentive for people to buy something that they would otherwise not buy, unless it came with that modified IP. It's now beyond personal use.

Even if you didn't open the OSX box to load it on the PC but only gave instructions to the buyer on how to load OSX on to a PC. You would still be guilty of copyright infringement if it can be proven that you encourage the infringement. That's how the RIAA and movie industry shut down Napster and Grokster.

That is a ridiculous, unsupportable assertion. Every Macintosh computer ever sold has included an original license to install and run Mac OS. I will repeat that because it needs to be clearly understood: Every Macintosh computer Apple has ever produced, has included a license to run Mac OS.

There are a finite number of original licenses to run Mac OS in existence in the world. Specifically, exactly one original license to run Mac OS exists for every Mac that has ever been manufactured. Every other license that has accompanied any retail boxed edition of Mac OS has been permission to upgrade the OS version of an existing license.

Whether or not you wipe the hard drive clean is irrelevant - the license to run Mac OS itself doesn't disappear along with the software. The license is not a piece of software, or a file on a disc somewhere that can be deleted, but rather a legal agreement granting permission to run the software in the first place.

The fact that certain pieces of OS X installation media may have or have not been capable of being installed on a wiped-clean hard drive is an arbitrary technical decision made by Apple, but I don't see it imposing any legal requirement on the "upgrade" status of the software license.

Using an "upgrade" OS X disc on a Mac that has been wiped clean is not illegal, because Apple gets to decide what preconditions are necessary to qualify for an upgrade. If at their discretion they decided that, for Leopard, an Apple-manufactured computer is the only qualification, regardless of whether the hard drive actually contains any previous version at the time of installation, then that's their decision to make.

Every "upgrade" disc produced by Microsoft for the Windows platform is capable of being installed from scratch on a blank hard drive. (Yes, this even includes Windows 95, 98 and ME, despite what was said in a previous post.) Microsoft doesn't care if the previous version of the OS is actually present on the hard drive or not, they just want to have confirmation that, at some point in the past, a legitimate copy of the original qualifying software has been purchased for the computer in question. If you're installing on a blank drive, the installer will verify evidence of previous ownership by allowing you to insert a key or other unique identifying feature from a previous installation disc at the time of installation to prove the existence of the prior license. This is necessary because, in the beige box PC world, where Microsoft doesn't regulate the manufacturing of hardware, there is no guarantee that any particular compatible piece of hardware actually was sold in a bundle along with a license to run Windows. So Microsoft needs to resort to external checks to verify the prior existence of a license.

Since all Macintosh computers capable of running OS X have had some unique feature in hardware or firmware which the OS can inspect at installation time to verify that the computer is a genuine Apple-manufactured machine (except in cases where ether the OS installer or the computer's firmware has been hacked), and since every Macintosh computer was sold with a license to run Mac OS, Apple doesn't need to bother checking for a previous installation, or asking to verify the state of the previous installation disc. The very fact that it's being installed on genuine Apple hardware in the first place is a guarantee that a previous Mac OS license must exist.

It doesn't really matter if your second hand Mac has an OS or not. It is still an Apple labelled computer. I am sure Apple has no problem with the Mac second hand market. At least they are not losing a sale to a competitor.


Individual "people"? No I haven't. When "people" try to turn that into a volume business that has the potential to harm Apple's business..... I have!



What is legal about that? Apple states that they only allow you to install THEIR software on THEIR computers. Do you really think that you can avoid breaking the rules by .... maybe.... asking a friend to break the rules for you?

"I didn't murder him your honour. I requested that Pystar do it!"

If you have a problem with Apple's "rules" being legally binding then fine, argue that point. Your comments only offer the case for circumventing them.


They are modifying and illegally installing another company's copyrighted intellectual property. They are using that as an inducement to sell their own product.

What law is Apple breaking? (Try that without using the M word!)

True, however...

1. Selling a copy of OS X on it's own to someone on the street is hardly a volume business.
2. Psystar is distributing a modified copy of Apple's work (this is the main issue in this case).
3. Psystar aren't selling OS X on it's own (as would be the case with your selling on the street example).

If that's what you are looking for then Windows is your OS of choice, and non-Apple is your choice of hardware. And that is when you enter the world of pain that is Windows and it's sea of crap drivers some for nVidia-based cards, others for the same CPU on an official nVidia card, for example. Which don't inter-operate all the time.


That was a problem with the BIOS that ATI had shipped on the cards.


Apple are trying to put the hammer to Psystar, or had you missed that? It's just the courts are busy for a whole year.

I'm not convinced that by itself would make any difference.


I conceded (in the last sentence of the post you've partially quoted) that Psystar was doing more than just reselling the original disc. I totally agree that as soon as they started selling modifications of Apple's copyrighted work, they were treading perilously on Apple's exclusive rights.

Again, I'm not sure that by itself would make any difference - for example, consider the possible case of reselling OS X in a bundle along with a bag of peanuts.

On the other hand, if they sold it along with, say, a booklet giving instructions on how to circumvent the EULA on your own, I'd err on the side of caution and say they were probably in the wrong.

So it's like the dells that have windows with them that you have the RIGHT NOT TO pay for so call apple and say I want to buy a mac with no software on it and I want the cost of mac os x taken off the price then you will find out the cost of the os that each system has in it's price. Then some should be able to buy osx for that price.

That may be a different situation. The Windows EULA clearly states/stated that you may choose to not accept the software license and return the software to the vendor. If Apple's Mac OS X EULA shows a clear and concise seperation between the OS and HW, then you would be right, but since it's purposely sold as a bundle from the same company I doubt that Apple would word their EULA in such a manner. But check it out, and if so, give it a shot. It would be fun to read about.