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Apple is Sued After Pressuring Open-source iTunes Project

The fight is over efforts to get iPods, iPhones working with non-iTunes software

By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

April 28, 2009 — IDG News Service —

The operator of a technology discussion forum has sued Apple Inc., claiming that the company used U.S. copyright law to curb legitimate discussion of its iTunes software.

The lawsuit, filed Monday, could test the limits of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It centers around an open-source effort to help iPods and iPhones work with software other than Apple's iTunes. Last November, Apple's lawyers demanded that the Bluwiki.com Web site remove a project called iPodhash, saying that it violated the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.

The lawsuit was filed jointly in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and attorneys representing OdioWorks, the small Herndon, Va., company that runs Bluwiki. The lawyers argue that the iPodhash discussions were about reverse-engineering software, not breaking copy protection, and want a court ruling to clarify the matter.

The EFF has previously argued that reverse-engineering in order to build new products is permitted under the DMCA. However, this case is a little different, according to Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the digital civil liberties organization. "This is the first time I've seen a company suggest that simply talking about reverse-engineering violates the DMCA," he said. "All of the previous cases have been cases that involved actual successful reverse-engineered tools."

Bluwiki is a free wiki service that hosts discussion pages for a number of projects. After Apple's November takedown letter, three Web pages that talked about a cryptographic function used by iTunes were removed from the Bluwiki Web site.

Open-source developers have been working on breaking cryptographic mechanisms used by iTunes since 2007. That's when Apple first introduced a special operation, called a checksum hash, into its products to ensure that Apple's devices were communicating with iTunes and not some other type of software.

Developers reverse-engineered Apple's checksum mechanism, but in late 2008 the company introduced a new version of the crypto-technique with its iPod Touch and iPhone products. That's what was being discussed when Apple filed its takedown notice.

The EFF and OdioWorks said that iPodhash was trying to get the iPod and iPhone to work with other software, such as Winamp or Songbird, and that the work would also help iPod and iPhone users who run the Linux operating system, because Apple doesn't ship a version of iTunes for Linux.

However, in a Dec. 17 letter to the EFF, Apple's law firm said that the EFF is "mistaken" to assume that this technology is only used to authenticate the iTunes software. The work also threatens Apple's FairPlay copy-protection system, the letter states.

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