Apple Sued for Stifling Web Speech About iPhone, iPod Security

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on April 28, 2009 - 8:49am.

San Francisco - Apple (NASD: AAPL) has been sued by digital civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) over its stifling of discussion about methods of putting non-Apple software on iPhones and iPods on the Internet. Apple sent OdioWorks, the operator of a website called BluWiki where users were discussing such methods, a letter demanding the discussions be removed. The company argues that the discussions violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which it is a crime to circumvent copy-protection security measures.

The discussions on BluWiki centered on efforts to bring rival media software to Apple's own iTunes, such as Winamp and Songbird, to the iPhone and iPod.

The EFF and OdioWorks today filed a federal lawsuit in San Francisco against Apple, seeking a declaratory judgment that the discussions do not violate any of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and do not infringe any of Apple's copyrights.

"Apple's legal threats against BluWiki are about censorship, not about protecting their legitimate copyright interests," said EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann.

"It's legal to engage in reverse engineering in order to create a competing product, it's legal to talk about reverse engineering, and it's legal for a public wiki to host those discussions."

Related Links:
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/04/27

http://snipurl.com/gxx6p (PDF of complaint)

http://snipurl.com/gxws3 (Wired)