Tag Archives: copyright infringement

[News] Blogosphere Under Attack by Righthaven LLC

Wired.com published an article about the business strategies of Las Vegas based law firm Righthaven LLC. Righthaven’s strategy to “save” the media world is simple:

  • buy copyrights of newspaper articles
  • instead of sending takedown notices under the DMCA,
  • they rather sue blogs and website, who repost articles without consent of the owner

Righthaven’s first client is the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Between March and July 2010 Righthaven has filed at least 80 lawsuits against bloggers and website owners.

And this is just the beginning, according to Wired.com:

[Steve] Gibson says, he’s just getting started, Righthaven has other media clients that he won’t name undtil the lawsuits start rolling out (..).

Links

» Wired.com: Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits
» Law.com: Is This the Birth of the Copyright Troll?
» Spiegel.de: Abmahnungen gegen Blogs – Notwehr als Geschäftsmodell (german only)

[e-Biz] Mac Clone Supplier Psystar sued by Apple

Eventually Apple sues Psystar for having broken license terms and having committed copyright infringement of MacOS X 10.5 Leopard and Leopard Server. Psystar offers PCs pre-installed with MacOS X Leopard. As reported in german media heise.de Apple claims these points:

  • Psystar may have broken Apple’s license terms that allow installing MacOS X Leopard only on “Apple-labeled computers”. Apple says this means “Apple manufactured hardware”.The debate about what an “Apple-labeled computer” exactly is, is as old as tutorials that deal with installing MacOS X Tiger and Leopard on white box PCs. People in forums were joking about putting an original Apple sticker on your PC case may fit the necessity of the notion “Apple-labeled computer”. Obviously this is not enuff and Apple’s guerilla strategy comes to an end when other companies begin to develop business model out of their work. This will be a major topic and we are quite curious how Apple will explain the notion “Apple-labeled computer”.
  • Psystar may have violated Apple’s copyrights by providing modified MacOS X updates for their “Open Computer” customers.
  • Psystar may have damaged Apple’s brand, because of Psystar’s support for MacOS X being poor.

Apple’s lawsuit comprises of 35 pages and was issued shortly after Psystar began distributing a modified version of the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update. An online version of it can be viewed here.

We yet reported about Psystar’s business here:

» The never ending Psystar Story
» Psystar offers OpenPro
» Psystar offers Mac Clone