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Court refuses request to review Psystar case
You have to give Psystar credit for being tenacious. The Mac clone company spent four years fighting Apple and took its legal battle all the way to the Supreme Court. According to a CNET report, the Supreme Court on Monday refused Psystar's request to review a lower court decision that prevents the company from selling non-Apple hardware with OS X. The decision upholds the original ruling in 2009 which said Psystar "violated Apple's exclusive reproduction right, distribution right, and right to create derivative works." Apple was awarded a permanent injunction against Psystar and the company was forced to stop selling its Mac clones. This Supreme Court rejection should put an end to litigation between the two companies.
Apple and Psystar still battling in court
Like a league of zombies that just won't go away, Mac clone maker Psystar just keeps coming back for more punishment. In the most recent chapter of this ongoing courtroom drama, Psystar filed an Opening Brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in its request for an appeal to the permanent injunction that keeps the company from making Mac clones. Contrary to its former tactic of making all court filings open, Psystar requested that the Opening Brief be sealed. Apple, on the other hand, made its Answering Brief public and the contents were interpreted for The Mac Observer by an attorney who said that Psystar's strategy seems to be focused on "getting the court to adopt a radical revision of the Copyright Misuse doctrine that would in effect destroy copyright and force all copyrighted works to be licensed." Apple's Answering Brief noted that "Because Psystar has no proof that Apple has inhibited competition or suppressed creativity, Psystar urges this Court to abandon long-standing precedent and create a new doctrine of per se copyright misuse. Under this doctrine, any license agreement - such as Apple's SLA - that restricts the use of copyrighted software to particular hardware is per se copyright misuse." Apple also stated that "Psystar's grossly overbroad per se theory of copyright misuse would eliminate fundamental rights guaranteed by the Copyright Act -- the rights to control the reproduction, modification, and distribution of copyrighted works." The court system is unlikely to completely revamp the long-established tenets of copyright law, but the way this case seems to keep coming back from the dead, anything is possible.
Psystar to countersue Apple for antitrust violations, will ask court to declare Leopard EULA void
Wannabe Mac cloners Psystar hired itself some hotshot lawyers to defend against Apple's lawsuit, and they're not wasting any time earning their fees -- as Psystar's hinted in the past, it's going to countersue Apple for antitrust violations and ask that the court declare the Leopard EULA void. That's a pretty longshot argument, especially since EULAs have traditionally been upheld in California and Florida and we find it hard to believe a court would find a company with ten percent marketshare to be abusing a monopoly position, but we'll see how everything goes down -- this one is going to have some fireworks for sure.
