Apple Finally Sues Psystar
Posted on 15 July 2008, at 1:01 pm, by Christopher Gavula
I just ran into a story over at macnn.com, and it looks like Apple has decided that it’s had enough of the cloning and it’s finally filed suit in California against Psystar. Apparently they did this back on July 3rd.
Short form – Apple says Psystar violated Apple copyrights, trademarks, and licenses, and Psystar says Apple can’t dictate what kind of hardware their OS is run on and they are violating antitrust laws.
So I guess it’s game on.
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4 Comments For This Post
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July 15th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
so Psystar is finally saying, “bring it.” Interesting. I’ll be watching this one to see how it plays out.
BTW, I called and asked for a review unit a few months ago, followed up with an e-mail or two and haven’t heard anything. I wonder if this is really just someone testing the Anti-trust waters or if they’re serious…
July 15th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
I, for one, am not surprised about Apple’s actions, however, I also don’t see how in the world Apple has a leg to stand on since Mac’s are Intel boxes now and can run Windows just as well as Mac OS X. One of these days, Apple will fall. It may not happen until jobs leaves, but they will. What they are doing is settling back and acting very much like Microsoft when they should be working on further innovation of not just the PC platform but the iPhone and iPod as well. I mean come on….the iPhone still does not have copy/paste. How stupid is that??
July 15th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Well, they had to know this was coming. I’m guessing they checked with alot of lawyers first and they said, they have a shot. The big item will be if they have the $$ to fight it.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
I am not a lawyer, but my gut is that Psytar is screwed. The thing is, Apple is free to create what they want, and dictate that they want it sold for their hardware. It’s a closed system, and it’s a straw man argument to throw anti-trust into the mix. Apple owns the market for OS X because they created OS X, own OS X, and choose not to share it. There is NOTHING illegal about that. Anti-trust does not mean “He made a rilly rilly kewl OS and I WANT TOO”. Anti-trust means actively preventing competitors to your market. It does not mean giving up your intellectual property, especially when there was never an expectation of a market outside of Apple for OS X. Microsoft’s anti-trust issues come from preventing competitors who have similar products, like IE vs Netscape. If Apple were going around somehow preventing Dell from doing business, THAT would be anti-trust.
I think Apple would have a much more difficult time if Psystar sold the computers as-is, with a sly wink to the fact that a certain OS could run on them. But marketing them as OSX machines was dumb. Apple can’t and won’t go after the end-user, but they sure as hell can go after the messenger. These guys seem like they just wanted their 15 minutes of tech infamy and to prove a point.