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Apple Files Motion to Dismiss Psystar's Counterclaims, as text

By Pamela Jones et al.

Apple has filed a motion to dismiss [PDF] Psystar's counterclaims, which hardly surprises me. I have it as text for you. Apple has asked for a court date on November 6th at 8 AM in Judge William Alsop's courtroom in San Francisco. If any of you are in the area and can attend, that would be fabulous.

Apple says something quite simple and, as far as I'm concerned true, that Apple has no obligation to help Psystar compete against Apple. After all, Apple is not dominant in the field of computers, and Psystar's business model proves it:

Psystar's very business model is premised on the fact that Apple's computers compete directly with personal computers using different operating systems. In its Counterclaims Psystar admits computers with the Macintosh operating system ("Mac OS") are one of many types Psystar sells to consumers: "PSYSTAR manufactures and distributes computers tailored to customer choosing. As a part of its devotion to supporting customer choice, PSYSTAR supports a wide range of operating systems including Microsoft Windows XP and XP-64 bit, Windows Vista and Vista 64-bit, Linux (32 and 64-bit kernels), and the MacOS." Counterclaims, ¶ 15, lines 8-11 (emphasis added). Since customers are choosing between these computer systems, the systems necessarily compete with one another. For these reasons and others, Psystar's effort to assert antitrust claims premised on the existence of a relevant product market restricted solely to Apple's products fails as a matter of law.

Moreover, the ultimate goal of Psystar's Counterclaims is an order from this Court compelling Apple to help competitors, like Psystar, by forcing Apple to license its proprietary software to those competitors for use on their own computer hardware. Psystar's effort is contrary to law and must be rejected. Neither the federal nor the state antitrust laws require competitors to stop competing with, and instead to start helping, each other.

So it asks that all of what it terms Psystar's "deeply flawed antitrust counterclaims" be dismissed with prejudice.

Full post as published by Groklaw on October 02, 2008 (boomark / email).