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Estate Planning

: Florida Estate Planning Lawyer Blog

Apple Sues Clone Maker Psystar

By David M. Goldman

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In my previous life, I had a license to build Apple Clones. It is for this reason that I have been watching the actions of a Florida Company, Psystar, Inc. They have been installing Apple, Inc.'s most recent operating system on generic computers and selling them to the public as "Apple Clones". Apple's software license states that its software can only be installed on computers which were preinstalled with a previous version of Apple's operating system. Apple started including this provision when it switched from version 7.6 to the 8.0 version. An even that effectively ended cloning back in the late 1990's.

At that time my company PowerTools also purchased retail copies of the current operating system and installed them on our Apple Clone Computers. That is we installed version 8.0 of the Operating System on our Apple Clones which were licensed for version 7.6 of the Macintosh OS. Unline Psystar, PowerTools' clone had a legal version of the Macintosh OS preinstalled. Because of this Apple "allegedly" went to our supplier and had our OEM agreement terminated.

This is why I have been so interested in what Psystar has been doing. It appears to be a clear violation of the Macintosh operating system license.

It will be interesting to see Psystar's explanation of why they believe they can use the Mac OS in violation of the licensing agreement.

The Gray Blog first reported news of the suit against Pystar.

Full post as published by Florida Estate Planning Lawyer Blog on July 16, 2008 (boomark / email).