Tag Archives: copyright infringement

[News] Blogosphere Under Attack by Righthaven LLC

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

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