Apple sued over attempt to gag forums

Last November, Apple sent a legal letter to OdioWorks demanding it remove documents posted on its BlueWiki discussion forums, in which users illustrated how to make the iPhone (and iPod touch) work with third party music software.

Although OdioWorks initially complied with Apple’s legal threat, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has since taken the case on and filed a law suit in San Francisco against Apple, claiming its demand was an illegal breach of First Amendment rights.

“I take the free speech rights of BluWiki users seriously,” says owner of OdioWorks, Sam Odio. “Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussions.”

Should the case go ahead, it will be a serious test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and could have far reaching implications for Apple. Its original legal threat against BlueWiki was due to its continued efforts to ensure Apple products can only be operated in conjunction with iTunes, and BlueWiki’s documents involved the reverse engineering of this system.

Typically, reverse engineering has been considered quite different to copyright infringement, stemming right back to the mid-1980s with Nintendo’s security systems installed in its NES cartridges - a system almost identical to iTunes's current cryptography.

“What this guy was doing was legitimate,” Odio concludes. “He was just trying to reverse engineer Apple's products to try to get them to work with Linux and other third-party software.”

Apple has declined to comment.