Posted on 12/27/2009 7:24:44 PM PST by nickcarraway
Mac clone maker defends Rebel EFI, likens it to 'reading a book in the bathroom'
Mac clone maker Psystar last week indefinitely suspended sales of its only product, a $50 utility that lets customers install Apple's Snow Leopard operating system on generic Intel-based computers.
The company also said it would resume selling systems "in the coming days." Those machines will run Linux rather than Mac OS X.
Psystar, which began selling Mac clones in April 2008, has been battling Apple in federal court in California since July 2008, when Apple sued the Doral, Fla. firm, saying it violated copyright laws by preinstalling the Mac operating system on its machines.
Sales of Rebel EFI, which Psystar launched in October, have been "voluntarily suspended" while the company seeks clarification from the courts about whether the software is legal, Psystar said in a Dec. 22 statement. "Psystar feels it would be prudent to halt the sale of Rebel EFI while we explicitly ask the court for clarification on the legality of Rebel EFI."
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
I see it's the same ol' misconceptions:
> You pay for OSX you should be able to do what you please with it. So far Apple has slid by with dubious court rulings that it can include in the OSX license that it must be installed on Apples rip off priced hardware
The license is perfectly legal. It's no different from Microsoft's license which says you can only install Windows on one computer (or two depending on the terms of the EULA), not 10 or 100. Can't you read? Your argument is totally discredited from a legal point of view.
Please try to understand this:
YOU DO NOT OWN THE OS SOFTWARE. YOU PURCHASE A LICENSE TO USE IT IN A PRESCRIBED MANNER.
And note that personally (not legally) I would like to be able to use software and hardware as I damn please, too. But unlike you and some other dense folks here, I can read the license.
> One day the Jesse Jobs gang will get smacked down in court and you will be able to legally install OSX on whatever you please...After all you paid for it and won it
Care to bet on that?
For that to come true, the US court system will have to invalidate the entire concept of software EULAs. Not just Apple's, but Microsoft's and every other proprietary software vendor's licenses as well.
If you don't like the license, don't buy it. How freaking hard is that to understand (see similar comments above also)?
If you don't already use it, I suggest you stick to Linux, rather than OS-X or Windows. Linux' licensing is much more flexible in the regards which concern you.
Question: Since you obviously hate Apple, a successful American capitalist company, and want to take their hard-earned income and distribute it amongst those who haven't paid for it, I have to ask -- are you really a socialist? It sure sounds like you prefer a socialist approach...
I don't think Vista+Win7 are that big a slice (although I could be mistaken).
Of course, "NT" is generally assumed to be "NT4", but Vista and Win7 are "NT6", just like Win2K and XP are "NT5". But no combination of labels quite makes sense....
Got me//
And yet those "shrink-wrap" licenses are the basis of the entire commercial software industry. If they are voided by the court, what's to keep users from buying one copy of Office or Windows and installing it on hundreds of machines? The American software market would quickly resemble China's.
I don't blame Apple. I a hoping the Court invalidates their contract and allows people freedom to use an OS they have purchased on any hardware they choose.
Not gonna happen. Apple's original model was to build Macs with ROMs in the hardware without which the OS won't run. The content of the ROM was copyrighted. In recent years, the Mac has gone to EFI -- the equivalent of the BIOS on PCs -- instead of hard-coded system routines, because it's more efficient. They could, and would, go back to some sort of copyrighted code that isn't available at any price without Mac hardware, and without which Mac OS won't run.
They'd be just another company selling cheap commodity hardware. That's a crowded market. It's like asking why someone would pay for a McDonald's franchise instead of just opening his own burger joint.
Not once word got out via customers/word-of-mouth OS X could be installed on it. Stuff would sell like crazy, IMO IF, and ONLY IF, the hardware was solid and 1/3rd or more less than the price of Mac products.
That wouldn’t set Psystar apart. There are already plenty of PCs that, with the appropriate hack, can run OS X; what set Psystar apart was that it was pre-installed, and later that their RebelEFI software made it easier. If you have to peruse the Hackintosh sites, download the hacks, and follow the directions to install them, Psystar is just another box.
The part where you buy a copy of the software and thus under copyright are entitled to exercise your Fair Use rights, legal fictions of adhesion contracts notwithstanding.
The software has a EULA. I have no tolerance for this approach for circumventing copyright.
I use the same "It looks like a duck" approach as in the Autodesk and Wise cases. A person paid for and received a copy of the software. A very strong indicator that it a sale (making the buyer the owner) is if it remains in the buyer's perpetual possession and there is no provision to return it after a set time. This is the case in most retail sales, so a EULA term that says otherwise is invalid. Precedent counter to this relies on MAI Sys. Corp. v. Peak Computer, but that didn't even cite the prior Wise (IOW, bad judgment ignoring precedent), and was later invalidated by a change in the law anyway.
In short, "Designating an agreement as a 'license' does not determine whether it transfers ownership." The nature of the transaction itself does.
That's interesting, and brings up a serious First Amendment issue.
Paystar’s hardware was standard box o’ parts. In a PC or Linux market they’d get trounced by much better OEMs. The only thing special was offering OS X.
As far as the price of the hardware, well, you got what you paid for. You also didn’t get any support. Their support was marginal at best from what I heard, and Apple certainly isn’t going to support OS X on non-Apple hardware.
While I defend Psystar’s right to resell OS X on principle, I honestly can’t see why anyone would have bought a system from them to use. You go Mac because you want to get out of the PC rathole, and going Psystar barely gave you a leg out of it since OS X is only part of what makes Macs good.
Again...
Psystar is not an end user
not a unknowing consumer
it is a business, making money
off of other peoples intellectual property
it apparently has plenty of Lawyers
who are quite adept at Contract law
They are trying to make a buck off of
someone else's intellectual property
with full knowledge of the EULA
An individual I would probably give a pass to
Not a corporation
They are legal toast
Psystar became the owner when they bought their copies of OS X. Timothy Vernor, the winning plaintiff in Vernor v. Autodesk, wasn't an end user either. He never used any of those copies of AutoCAD. He was running an eBay business making money reselling software. First Sale was established with a company that was not an end user, a company that violated what could be considered to be a primitive EULA that tried to control the resale of a book.
They are trying to make a buck off of someone else's intellectual property
You try to make this sound like software piracy. Their business model was based on paying full price for OS X and reselling it to end users. Apple made their buck and their rights to control distribution ended there.
However, apparently a few systems were shipped without the OS X originals, and Psystar should have to pay damages for those clear instances of infringement.
Dennis, you keep claiming this but the only counter court ruling is the one being appealed and there are numerous others that support Judge Alsup's ruling in the Apple v. Psystar ruling. That makes it NOT dubius. It makes it a fairly solid ruling that comports with numerous other previous ruling all supporting the SLAs and other EULAs that have been in use for over 40 years of of court challenges.
One day the Jesse Jobs gang will get smacked down in court and you will be able to legally install OSX on whatever you please...After all you paid for it and won it
Contrary to your delusional interpretation to the history of the jurisprudence in software law, a small minority of cases involving software license rulings have held that the buyer BOUGHT the software, usually because of poorly written software license contracts, and could do with it as they pleased, the vast majority of the cases have held the purchasers bought a LICENSE to use the software and were constrained by that license as to what they could and could not do with that software.
Look at all the "wink, wink" and innuendo that Psystar has in their announcement of impending sales of computers that are OS X ready. The judge ordered them to cease "contributory infringement" activities. The judge is not going to be sanguine about their advertising if it continues in this vein, especially if the continue with the offering the free distribution of the code to evade Apple's encryption to prevent OS X installation. I expect contempt sanctions.
The courts have ruled that "fair use" applies only where a sale has occurred. . . and they have also ruled that a license is not a sale of the underlying software. Ergo, no fair use applies except to the license. You are permitted to apply a fair use sale to the license. . . but that is as far as it goes. It does not extend to violating the license contract.
However, the license contract cannot prohibit certain limited "fair use" things such as making a back-up for safety purposes, proper installation on to the machine on which it is to be used, and a limited time use at a repair shop, or the contract may risk being held invalid as a license and the transaction be deemed a sale of the underlying software.
That’s the court ruling until one day it isn’t. The OSX/hardware monopoly is not engraved in stone. You may have that today until one day you don’t
All subject to court interpretations. Precedent is not a straight jacket
Within the 14th Amendment we need a better interpretation that stops anchor babies from being derived from the 14th. We are one Supreme Court ruling away from that. Apple is one or two court rulings away from losing its OSX monopoly over OSX buyers. That dictatorship is 100% pure bush league candy ass bllshit.
I agree Pystar’s behavior in all of this has been bizarre from the start. I concur if they advertise this “new” line of computers as being OS X compatible they are gonna get the judicial hammer, as well they should.
Windows 7 64 bit OS here and everthing worked right off the bat!
The Wise case is NOT a software case... It was a case involving the retail sales of copies of movies on 35mm and 16mm film. In particular, it involved a VIP copy of a "Camelot" that was given to Vanessa Redgrave who played Guinevere in the film in exchange for a print fee of $418.66. The studio legal department, in preparing the papers, neglected in her license for this one copy to include their standard boilerplate that the studio retained title to the movie, although it spoke throughout the agreement that it was a license to her to keep the copy at her home, licensed only for home showing to groups of less than ten, not licensed for commercial showing, could not be sold, transfered, bequeathed, etc., and had to be returned to the studio on her death... but the paragraph that the studio retain ownership of the title was missing from the agreement. Somehow Emmanuel Wise got possession of it and was acquiring copies (and in some cased making copies) and reselling them along with other movies.
The courts held, on appeal of his conviction of criminal copyright infringement, that although he was guilty of copying the many other movies, in this one instance he was NOT GUILTY because the title to his copy was unclear (!) and reversed that one count of the conviction. The court also tossed out four other of Wise's convictions because he had acquired the complete movies from a company that had bought the films under a strict contract to DESTROY them... but had not, violating their contracts. Again, the studios had sold them with a contract that stupidly did not retain the rights to the content on the film to the companies who had agreed to only DESTROY them to smelt them for the silver content... but had instead resold them to Wise... and the appellate court held Wise had acquired them under Fair Use. The appellate court upheld Wise's convictions on all other copies of VIP movies he was selling where the paragraph were included holding that indeed those were enforceable licenses... so the Wise case was unique. And unique cases do not make good case law.
The Judge in Autodesk case somehow ignored over a dozen pertinent software cases and instead distorted the unique Wise non-software case of the missing paragraph in the license agreement about non-digital copy of an analog film, that spoke of a license throughout the rest of the agreement, that was deemed because of that missing paragraph that should have retained title to the studio, into somehow being related to the Autodesk license agreement that INCLUDED the paragraph that retained title to the Autocad software to Autodesk and somehow confabulated that merely because the Autodesk required that its property not be resold at the end of its useful life and instead be destroyed, against all reason was a sale instead of a license.
Those are the weak hooks the ENTIRE Autodesk decision of September 30, 2009 hangs on—and why it is being appealed even as we are having this discussion. Most legal scholars who have analyzed the Autodesk case believe it will be overturned based on this novel misuse of the Wise decision.
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