May 5, 2006 | In Technology, Law |
Apple Computer has used its lawsuit-happy business strategy to get itself in a tricky and potentially embarrassing situation.
The computer manufacturer is suing popular online humor community, Something Awful, after the owner of the site linked to one of Apple’s service manuals. Apple has demanded that the link be removed, despite the fact that it appears as part of an informed discussion about the MacBook Pro on the Something Awful web forum.
“The Service Source manual for the MacBook Pro is Apple’s intellectual property and is protected by US copyright law. Linking to the manual on your website is an infringement of Apple’s copyrights,” reads the request from Apple. “We therefore must insist that you immediately take all necessary steps to remove the Service Source manual and any other Apple copyrighted material from your site and to prevent further unauthorized use or distribution of Apple intellectual property.”
Something Awful founder, Richard Kyanka, however, insists that the link doesn’t violate any laws.
“I replied to Apple and told them basically to screw off because I’m not doing anything illegal,” Kyanka explained. “NOTHING, I repeat, NOTHING is even hosted on SA. All we have is a link going to somebody else’s webspace. I guess Apple has no clue how the internet even works; they should be threatening to sue the ISP hosting the horribly illegal service manual, not some guy who runs a forum where his forum members are TRYING TO HELP people fix issues with their faulty Apple computers.”
In this case, he is almost certainly in the clear, due to previous court rulings determining that deep linking from one website to another is not in violation of the Copyright Act.
In the end, Apple’s insistence to pursue this issue will only serve to spread the bad reputation of its MacBook Pro laptop computer.
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apcservicder
Comment by Mike — September 23, 2006 #