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Comparing Apples to Apples

Considering the immense, vast and massive amounts of success that Apple enjoys with its iPhone and iPods you wouldn’t think that they would need to be too active in the courts, getting on the case of people and companies who may have said or written things that haven’t totally pleased them. Then again, this sort of sensitivity to real or perceived threats might well be one of the contributory factors in their success.

In the week that Apple saw it’s billionth iPhone app downloaded and announced second-quarter profits of $1.21bn (£822m) and $8.16bn in sales, the company also found itself in an American court faced with two San Francisco-based law firms, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Keker & Van Nest.

The lawyers are representing a Virginia-based company OdioWorks, who operate a non-commercial wiki – BluWiki. OdioWorks were recently forced by Apple to remove a thread that discussed integrating non-Apple software with iPhones and iPods.

Wired reports that the threads discussed reverse engineering a checksum hash connected to the iTunesDB file. Cracking the checksum, according to the posters, enables iPods and iPhones to sync with other desktop management tools such as Winamp or Songbird.

It’s Apple’s threat to sue that has provoked a countersuit from OdioWorks claiming that the BluWiki broke no law. According to OdioWorls writers of the wiki threads “had apparently not yet succeeded in their reverse engineering efforts and were simply discussing Apple’s code obfuscation techniques,”

The claim is that Apple as well as having proprietary control over the millions of iPhones (3.8 million iPhones have been sold in Q1 alone) and the iPod (11 million sales in Q1) is attempting also to control free speech on them too.

Apple themselves claim that the BluWiki threatens its Fairplay copy protection scheme. Nuts and sledgehammers or justified defence of a commercial advantage?