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 Apple Reverses Course on Public Chats, Withdraws BluWiki ObjectionResearch Staff, Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, September 11, 2009
Abstract: The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Apple has stepped back from threats of legal action against BluWiki, a host of public wiki pages that discussed the use of software other than iTunes to download media onto Apple products--but the withdrawal of threats was based on the pages having been rendered obsolete by new code.
In November of 2008, Apple objected to a thread on BluWiki, a public wiki hosting site, which discussed the use of software other than iTunes to download media onto the iPod and iPhone. Apple's concern, as reported in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology's Flash Digest was that the content was "designed to circumvent Apple's Fairplay digital rights management system" and thus violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (For more info see Anticircumvention (DMCA) and Reverse Engineering.) In response to threats of legal action, BluWiki removed the pages, but at the same time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest filed a lawsuit on behalf of BluWiki's operator, OdioWorks, seeking a declaratory judgment in order to "clarify the rights of the parties." According to a July 2009 press release by EFF, Apple recently sent a letter "withdrawing its cease-and-desist demands and stating that 'Apple no longer has, nor will it have in the future, any objection to the publication of the iTunes DB Pages.'" However, the letter, posted by EFF here, also says that the discussions on BluWiki were rendered obsolete by changes in Apple's code in the seven months that have passed since they were taken down. Will technology stop this discussion where legal threats did not? |
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