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Psystar - The November 12, 2009 Hearing Transcript

By Pamela Jones et al.

Last time we looked in on Apple v. Psystar, Psystar had lost big time and was filing an appeal and telling the lower court they would be very, very legal while awaiting word from the appeals court.

While you and I wait, we can read the newly released transcript [PDF] from the hearing held on November 12, 2009. This was the final hearing prior to the ruling from Judge Alsup in the California case that shut down Psystar. Both parties had filed motions for summary judgment, Apple for copyright infringement and violation of the DMCA, among other things. Psystar had asserted essential step and first sale defenses, along with copyright misuse. All the filings can be found on our permanent Psystar Timeline page, if you want to really follow along with all the fine points.

But for now, let's review recent history, and let's try to discern the bigger picture. First, we had SCO alleging that the GPL was unConstitutional in its litigation against IBM in connection with an assertion of ownership of code that both a judge and a jury have now ruled it never owned. Next, we had Psystar claiming that Apple had no right to tie hardware and software, claiming both antitrust violation and, when that failed, copyright misuse. Then we had MySQL's prior owner asking the EU Commission to change the license on that code, the GPL, to a BSD-like license to make it more business-friendly. And now we have TurboHercules asking the EU Commission to find IBM has no right to license its code to whomever it wishes.

Anybody starting to see a pattern to all this? The biggest pattern similarity to me is that all of them are about wanting to use someone else's code without having to abide by the license, the assertion that for one reason or another, the author of software code can't choose the terms under which he chooses to license it and that others who didn't write it get to use it the way they wish to, instead of having to write their own.

Full post as published by Groklaw on April 14, 2010 (boomark / email).