Judge dismisses Hackintosh maker's anti-Apple lawsuit
Setback for Psystar
Apple has successfully had the lawsuit brought against it by Hackintosh system builder Psystar thrown out of court - at least until its opponent can come up with a better case.
So said California District Court Judge William Alsup yesterday in response to the Mac maker's request that Psystar's lawsuit - filed in response to legal action mounted by Apple - be dismissed.
Psystar's lawyers had argued in the countersuit that Apple was engaged in anti-competitive behaviour by restricting in its end-user licence agreement how Mac OS X may be used. Apple is, they argued, abusing a monopoly position.
Not so, said the judge, who agreed with Apple's statement that no market can be defined by a single brand - you can't reasonably claim Honda, say, has a monopoly on Civic cars. It may be the only company making Civics, but the boundaries of the market are defined by its manufacture not of Civics but of cars, and by that definition it's not a monopoly.
Likewise, Apple has neither a monopoly on personal computer hardware nor on personal computer operating systems.
Judge Alsup did give Psystar the opportunity to provide a counter-argument, which it must file by Monday, 8 December.
Apple sued Psystar in July, after the smaller company began selling PCs and bundled copies of Mac OS X plus the software tools needed to run the non-Mac hardware. Apple said its EULA expressly forbids such installations - colloquially known as Hackintoshes.
Back in April, not long after Psystar began offering its clones, it was lambasted by one of the developers of the code needed to get OS X to run on a generic PC for violating the terms of his licence, which forbids the commercial use of his software.
COMMENTS
Windows won't run on my washing machine
I put a copy of Vista Home Premium in my washing machine on the 60 degree cotton colour-fast cycle and I was very disappointed with the result.
I have contacted several lawyers but they are unwilling to take my case, presumably because they know they can't beat Microsoft, which is a big rich monopoly.
@ Angus Millar
Since the licence agreement, and hence the contract under which you are agreeing to use the software, is very specific about only using it on Apple branded computers AND you can't buy an Apple without the OS, THEN every OS X pack they sell is in effect an upgrade. Whilst it will do a full, bare metal, install, that doesn't remove the fact that legally, it is in effect an upgrade from whatever the computer came with (or had previously been upgraded to).
And there are other software packages which are sold as an upgrade but which are in fact a full install. For example, Adobe CS3 upgrade from CS2 is actually a full installer and will run without having CS2 installed - you just need to put in a valid CS2 licence key to make it work. OS X doesn't have licence keys etc (except for Server).
@Brett #2
Where the f**k did you get the ludicrous idea that that Apple don't sell full OSX installers !
More to the point where do you get the neck to actually post such bollocks
Stupid
I am amazed that Psystar couldn't find a good argument against this. The "Windows only on Dells" example given in one of the previous comments pretty much sums it up.
Back in the 680x0 and PPC days, there was a compatibility gap which made it technically impossible to directly install MacOS on non-Mac hardware, partly because part of the OS was actually part of the Mac's firmware. This is why most of the early MacOS versions (5 thru 7) were able to fit on a 3.5" disk.
However, they switched over to Intel, and the "Classic" firmware isn't even there anymore. So basically, the MacOS is now just another x86 OS, which can run in any x86 hardware; however Apple resort to stupidly locking down their OS! The measures are very similar to MS making Windows impossible to run on non-MS-DOS systems (like DR-DOS); and legally that was proven wrong in court.
Oh, and the "they're not overpriced" story doesn't hold; Macs still have the same price-gap with PCs they had when they were actually using high-quality hardware (PPC arch, SCSI HDDs) even though the x86 hardware sells for peanuts; just check the price difference for SCSI HDDs!
In fact, I think this trial was already done with IBM some time ago ... all that stuff about being unable to bundle hardware and software.
Good luck, Psystar!
RE: But I want it my way!
The enshired right of first sale means that once you've bought something you own it and it's yours to do with whatever you want. Stick it up your nose, set it on fire, install it on a PC, whatever.
In the specific case of software it's a bit trickier because software is "licensed for use" via a contract agreement, not sold. However the legality of unsigned, shrinkwrapped buy-before-read EULAs is still something of a grey area by my understanding - it hasn't been proven decisively proven in court yet whether these have the same weight as a traditional contract or not.
There was a case a few years ago where Microsoft tried to sue someone for selling unwanted "OEM" copies of Windows on eBay, but I think they ended up dropping it due to bad publicity.
