Mac Rumors has a blurb today about Apple's legal team attacking Pystar with the DMCA:

ZDNet reveals that Apple has amended its lawsuit against Psystar with charges of violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA is a controversial law that criminalizes the act of circumventing copy protection.


I'm not sure exactly how Pystar gets OS X to work on their off-brand hardware. Still, Apple is getting an OS sale at retail price, I assume, for each Pystar box sold. This is not a total loss for Apple, and, as I think I discussed earlier, it could be a neat way to offload supporting folk looking for a bare bones box.

So perhaps Pystar has hacked something in a way that removes copy protection, but let's pretend they haven't. Let's pretend that they just used magic marker and got around it (I kid Hasselhoff, I kid!).

How far can someone go through licensing and the DMCA to restrict an item's use? That is, taken to ludicrous speed, if I slap a EULA and an RFID label on an Apple (making it at least partially digital), can I sue if you're curring them up and serving them on salads for friends? Perhaps that requires a, "Having folk over for dinner," license now.

In any event, I hope Pystar and Apple will become happy together. I understand Apple not wanting Pystar to create a laptop Mac clone. But I also understand them shoving the Mini off onto Pystar (though letting it grow to a tower). Seems like last time cloning Mac didn't work out so well, but it also seems that was due in part to bad negotiating. The cloning landscape changed once Jobs came back (again, check earlier link), but he wasn't opposed to cloning outright.

Check this from that Low End Mac article:

Motorola left the market at the end of the year, when its license expired, and Umax SuperMac hung in until the bitter end. Apple was working with Umax to license Mac OS 8 for low-end clones - specifically the sub-$1,000 market - but Umax realized there wasn't enough money to be made if they abandoned the high end of the market.


If Pystar can be convinced to stay in the sub-grand market, I wonder if we've got a deal.

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