Intellectual Property Law

Summary judgment granted to Apple in case against maker of Mac clones

By totoricaa

On November 13, U.S. District Judge William Alsup (N.D. Cal) granted summary judgment to Apple in its copyright infringement case against Psystar.  As background, Psystar offers non-Apple machines for sale to the public that come pre-installed with Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.  Psystar developed a work-around of Apple’s Mac OS X protection measures to run the operating system on their own machines, thus enabling customers to get the inner workings of a Mac without any of the burden of paying for Apple’s R&D or award-winning industrial design.

Judge Alsup rejected all of Psystar’s arguments, including under the first sale doctrine, holding that the doctrine only applies to legal copies, not the unauthorized copies that Psystar had made.  Apple also won its claim under the DMCA, with the judge holding that Psystar had violated the DMCA by circumventing Apple’s protective measures to prevent it from being installed on non-Mac machines.  The case does provide a few practice tips for aspiring attorneys.  If you are going to rely on a fair use defense, you may want to actually run through the ubiquitous four factors, as apparently Psystar was too busy to do so in their own brief and got slapped down by the judge.

With victory in hand, Apple has now moved on to the remedy; seeking a permanent injunction, which would prohibit Psystar from selling any machine that is pre-loaded with Apple’s operating system.  Apple is also asking for $2.1 million in statutory damages.  While this case was a seemingly easy win for Apple based upon these facts, a harder case may be yet to come from those in “hackintosh” industry that simply offer software that enables legitimate buyers of Mac OS X to install it on their own non-Apple machine, rather than actually pre-installing and distributing non-Apple machines containing Apple software. Apple would heavily rely on its EULA which prohibits customers from installing its OS X operating system on non-Apple computers.

Full post as published by BC Law Intell. Prop. & Tech. Forum on November 27, 2009 (boomark / email).