Star Psystar Responds to Apple Suit, Will Countersue
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 27th Aug 2008 22:21 UTC, submitted by tzineos
Law and Order Mac clone maker Psystar plans to file its answer to Apple's copyright infringement lawsuit Tuesday as well as a countersuit of its own, alleging that Apple engages in anticompetitive business practices. Miami-based Psystar, owned by Rudy Pedraza, will sue Apple under two federal laws designed to discourage monopolies and cartels, the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, saying Apple's tying of the Mac OS to Apple-labeled hardware is "an anticompetitive restrain of trade", according to attorney Colby Springer of antitrust specialists Carr & Ferrell. Psystar is requesting that the court find Apple's EULA void, and is asking for unspecified damages. Psystar's attorneys are calling Apple's allegations of Psystar's copyright infringement "misinformed and mischaracterized". Psystar argues that its OpenComputer product is shipped with a fully licensed, unmodified copy of Mac OS X, and that the company has simply "leveraged open source-licensed code including Apple's OS" to enable a PC to run the Mac operating system.
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RE: Broader issue ...
by lemur2 on Thu 28th Aug 2008 00:50 UTC in reply to "Broader issue ..."
lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

I think this will set a precedent on a much broader issue -- if a company sells you a piece of software, do they have a right to dictate to you on what hardware you can run it on? In other words, if I sell you a piece of accounting software I wrote myself, do I then have a right to tell you that you can only run it on a computer that I built, even though it is perfectly capable of running on a PC that was built by a competitor down the street? Discuss ;)


"Product tying" typically seems to be illegal only for products that are unrelated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_tying
"Tying is the practice of making the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto or de jure customer conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good). It is often illegal when the products are not naturally related"

Mac software is hardly unrelated to the computer it runs on.

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