Although a judge recently ruled in favor of Apple in its copyright infringement case against Psystar, the two companies have reached a new settlement, according to Computerworld and other reports.
Details are sketchy at this point, and there's no confirmation from Apple, but Psystar claimed in a motion filed Monday that a partial settlement has been reached.
"Psystar has agreed on certain amounts to be awarded as statutory damages on Apple's copyright claims in exchange for Apple's agreement not to execute on these awards until all appeals in this matter have been concluded," noted Psystar's motion filed in federal court in San Francisco. "Moreover, Apple has agreed to voluntarily dismiss all its trademark, trade-dress, and state-law claims. This partial settlement eliminates the need for a trial and reduces the issues before this Court to the scope of any permanent injunction on Apple's copyright claims."
Psystar also seems to be looking for a loophole against any injunctions. Apple had asked the court to prevent Psystar from selling clones not just with Leopard, but also Snow Leopard, which was released after the lawsuit began. But in its filing, Psystar argued that it should be allowed to sell its Rebel EFI utility, which lets customers install Snow Leopard on clones sold by the company, thus moving the legal burden away from Psystar.
Psystar's motion also indicated that another motion with further details would be filed Tuesday with Judge William Alsup.
Apple's lawsuit against Psystar began in July 2008 after Psystar started selling Mac clones with OS X installed on them. Apple has argued that its end user license lets people install its operating system on Apple computers only.
On November 13, Alsup ruled in favor of Apple, finding that Psystar's use of OS X on its clones was not "fair use" as the company contended and further finding that Psystar violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by "circumventing Apple's protection barrier."
Since then, Apple has been keen to shut down Psystar's Mac clone business permanently, calling for an injunction against the company and potentially millions of dollars in damages, substantially more money than the clone maker has.
Alsup's findings and Apple's fervor in going after Psystar raise the question of why Apple would agree to any kind of settlement at this point. A hearing was set for December 14, with a full trial scheduled to start in January. But if the latest news from Psystar is true, then the company may be able to avoid further courtroom drama.
Neither Psystar nor Apple has responded to requests for comment. We'll provide further details of this latest development as court documents become available.
The World Wide Web Consortium is opening the possibility of pushing back against an Apple patent on software updates that Apple had refused to license royalty-free for use in a proposed Web standard.
The W3C announced June 12 that it's seeking prior art relating to Apple's patent No. 5,764,992--in other words, examples of the patent's technology in use that predate the patent itself. The patent, which Apple applied for in 1995 and was granted in 1998, involves this scenario: "a software program running on a computer automatically replaces itself with a newer version in a completely automated fashion, without interruption of its primary function, and in a manner that is completely transparent to the user of the computer."
The consortium, which oversees standards including the HTML for Web page publishing and the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format, is working on a draft standard called Widgets 1.0: Updates that governs how Web-based applications can update themselves. Apple in March said it wasn't willing to include the patent's 30 claims in the royalty-free licensing requirements of W3C standards.
To deal with the patent matter while continuing with development of the standard, the consortium set up a patent advisory group (PAG).
"The PAG seeks information about software update systems available before June 1995 that offer a viable solution that may apply to the use of updates in Widgets," the W3C said about the prior-art search. "Such information could suggest ways to define a specification that can achieve the working group's goals without implementers infringing on the disclosed patent."
Finding prior art could help overturn the patent, but W3C spokesman Ian Jacobs said the consortium hasn't yet concluded what measures to take.
"There are lots of options once we have more information," Jacobs said. "One possible outcome, should we find prior art, is the patent might be re-evaluated. If it turns out there is prior art, that will be fodder for the next discussion."
Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Work on the draft specification can continue while the advisory group deals with the patent, Jacobs said, but the patent does complicate matters. "Does it cast a shadow over the specification? The answer is yes, until we have a better sense over the scope of the patent."
Via Dion Almaer
Corrected at 5:15 p.m.: This story initially misstated which standards the W3C oversees. It oversees HTML, Portable Network Graphics, and others.
Updated 4:05 p.m., with comment from Yahoo.
A Department of Justice probe into hiring practices among high-tech firms appears to have stretched out to include some of the best-known names in the industry.
The Washington Post first reported the story on Tuesday evening, listing Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Genentech as among the companies that were being looked at. Microsoft and Intel are also believed to have received requests for information, according to sources as well as to a New York Times report.
to The issue is believed to center on whether certain companies agreed not to hire from one another.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Intel all declined comment. Late on Wednesday, Yahoo confirmed it had received an inquiry from the government "a while ago."
"We have been contacted (by the DOJ), and we are cooperating," A Yahoo representative said.
Word of the probe took some in the tech industry by surprise, given several prominent cases of tech firms suing one another over worker poaching. Two of the companies said to be involved in the probe--Microsoft and Google--waged a fierce, multistate court battle after Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee was hired by Google. (The two sides eventually settled.)
More recently, Apple and IBM duked it out after Apple hired IBM executive Mark Papermaster. He eventually took up work at Apple, but only after a lawsuit and eventual settlement. IBM also sued over a recent Dell hire, David Johnson.
CNET News' Tom Krazit contributed to this report.
LAS VEGAS--Former Vice President Al Gore sought to link the democratic effects of information sharing with the growth of the wireless industry as the solution to all of life's problems.
Well, perhaps not all of life's problems. But in his address to CTIA 2009 attendees on the final day of the show, Gore made the case that previous revolutions in communications technology--such as the printing press and the radio--have dramatically improved access to information that has made the world more scientifically advanced and productive, and that modern wireless technology is capable of doing the same thing over time.
Former Vice President Al Gore also gave a keynote address at the Web 2.0 Summit in November.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)"Information is the dominant strategic resource of the economy in the 21st century," Gore said, drawing an analogy to the 1970s and the strain put on the economy by the dramatic rise in the price of oil. Information, on the other hand, has become cheaper and cheaper, with advances in processing power and wireless networking saving businesses untold amounts of money and giving average people a wealth of information at their fingertips.
Gore's hour-long speech touched on many of his usual themes about the environment, which won him the Nobel Prize in 2007. He also called on attendees to focus less on short-term business concerns and more on making the kinds of investments that will pay off in the long run at the expense of a short-term hit, such as adopting energy-efficient technologies.
Wireless technologies can be used to help monitor the health of the planet, he said, pointing to disappearing polar ice caps and rising temperatures. He also made sure to make several references to how wireless devices--namely the iPhone, produced by the company he oversees as a member of Apple's board of directors--have transformed the political process, allowing President Obama to tap a decentralized network of contributors to his successful campaign last year.
Gore's speech was originally supposed to be closed to the press, but he apparently changed his mind a few weeks ago. He did not allow photographs to be taken at the event, however.
Gore also declined to take any questions or address mounting concerns surrounding two journalists for his Current TV venture. American reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee are being detained in North Korea and are set to be tried for allegedly conspiring to perpetrate hostile acts against the Communist state.
My editors here at News.com have been poking fun at me for being the first reporter in the newsroom to buy an iPhone--and having no end of trouble getting AT&T to activate the blasted thing followed by paying one-third more than someone would if they went shopping today.
In fact, they thought it would be a hoot for me to write about the perils of early adoption. One editor gleefully told me a moment ago that he had bought a refurbished 8GB iPhone for $350 after today's price drop. Call it institutionalized schadenfreude, with a readbehind from the copy desk.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
So, sure, I'm not delighted about paying $600 for a phone that's being sold for $400 just over two months later. And, as much as I like my iPhone, I doubt that I got $200 worth over the value my old beater phone would have provided during that time.
I'm not alone. One iPhone-related blog said "it looks like Apple doesn't care about early adopters who just paid $600+ no more than 2 months ago." Another estimated, with depressing precision, that the iPhone Early Adopter Tax was $3 a day. Macenstein is "thoroughly pissed" and wants a $100 iTunes gift card (a perfectly reasonable thing for Apple to do, by the way, but more on this later).
Apple's forums are flooded with complaints and scattered reports that store credit or partial refunds are being granted. There's also talk of using a credit card company's price-protection guarantee to seek a refund of the difference, and price protection from Apple or AT&T if you bought it in the last few weeks.
But should people be all that peeved? Not really. It's no secret that computer prices tend to fall: The PlayStation 3 got $100 cheaper this summer, and the Motorola RAZR V3 was originally $500 with a service agreement. Now it's just $50. All of us iPhoniacs knew the price would fall by a third or so.
The only surprise was how soon. I had expected a revised iPhone in January (maybe with a video camera and 3G) to be accompanied by a price cut of around $200.
So am I truly harmed? Nope. I and my fellow early adopters obviously thought that the 8 GB iPhone was more valuable to us than $600 in the bank, or we wouldn't have coughed up the cash. I'd be facing that $200 loss if I wanted to sell my iPhone today, true, but I'm not planning on it. So it's more akin to an unrealized loss, and probably no harm at all if I sell it in a year; Apple merely made my iPhone worth a few hundred dollars less a few months earlier than I expected.
The real harm could be to Apple. Customer expectations are important. Apple adored the publicity that it received when announcing astonishingly high initial iPhone sales. If Apple customers come to expect price cuts after 60 days, early sales of the the Next Must Have Gadget will be anything but stellar.
If Apple needed to reduce the price because of market pressure or to meet its sales goals, that's perfectly understandable, of course. But the reason it should show flexibility in terms of rebates or gift certificates is not simply my unrealized, earlier-than-expected loss: it's to preserve Apple's own bottom line in the future.
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