Apple and Psystar enter out-of-court counseling
Judge lowers cone of silence on Mac clone scrap
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Before Apple and Psystar take their fight over Mac clones to court, the two must first attempt to work out their legal scrape with private mediation.
The companies have agreed to participate in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) under court orders, according to filings turned up by The Mac Observer.
The two have been exchanging legal filings since July, when Apple sued Psystar over copyright infringement for selling Mac OS X loaded on generic PCs.
Psystar returned fire in August by filing Sherman Antitrust Act complaints, accusing Apple of restricting its ability to trade and illegally monopolizing the market. Apple responded by asking the court to dismiss the monopoly complaint, and Psystar recently filed its argument to keep it.
They've agreed to hold their session by January 31, 2009.
ADR is non-binding mediation, allowing either party to reject the decision and request a trial if they don't like the outcome. The process is less formal — and more importantly for Psystar — less expensive than than official court proceedings.
The outcome, however, would remain private if an agreement is struck in the ADR process. That sort of secrecy should suit Apple just fine. In mediation, nobody can hear you scream.
But if Apple gets its way, Psystar's Mac clone business gets blasted from this plane of existence. That should make a ruling in Apple's favor pretty apparent.
Indeed, the best way to see if an out-of-court agreement is made is to keep checking Psystar's pulse. The company's still selling Mac clones as of today at least. ®
Update
Psystar counsel Colby Springer from the law firm Carr & Ferrell told El Reg this kind of mediation is not only procedural, but required in the Northern District of California court. He added Apple's motion for dismissal will need to be dealt with first before the mediation can take place.
COMMENTS
Apple BIOS, no such thing
Apple don't have a BIOS. They use Intel's EFI as firmware for their Intel Macs and when they used PPC chips they used SUN's OpenFirmware.
In other words, Apple do not make their firmware themselves, they license existing firmware from other companies. However, Apple do have their own OS. It is that OS, not the hardware or firmware which they have all legal rights to, including the right to determine how it is being licensed.
fair use doesn't apply to resellers anyway
What people seem to forget is that fair use only applies to *end users*, fair use does not apply to resellers. That means, if Joe Schmoe sticks a legal copy of OSX on a generic PC, he may be within the boundaries of fair use rights. However, if a retailer does it for boxes they resell, they have no right to do so because fair use does not apply to them.
@Daniel B
The PPC chips had to go. There's a reason they never made a notebook computer with a G5 chip: it's far too hot. I have a PowerBook G4 running at just 800 MHz, and it threatens my fertility every time I put it on my lap. The 1.67 GHz ones are probably an effective means of birth control. I do wish they'd gone with AMD rather than Intel, though; at least AMD still has sensible product names.
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