Nik Rawlinson
Mac cloner’s defeat is good news not just for Apple, but for consumers, too.
Could the Psystar story finally be drawing to a close? If you’ve missed it – somehow – Psystar, a US-based PC builder, found a way to convince Mac OS X that its PCs were actually Macs. It was a clever bit of fiddling with the bootloader that upset Apple and saw it haul the company to court.
Its defence was equally clever, with Psystar claiming that it had every right to buy a product and sell it on, even if it had been tweaked. It’s logical: if you bought a car, sprayed it pink and then resold it, you’d be well within your rights, but that’s because you don’t sign up to an End User License Agreement. The Agreement – often truncated to EULA – restricts what you can and can’t do with the software, and in Mac OS X’s case one of those restrictions is running it on non-Mac hardware.
Now depending on your point of view, this could be a good thing or a serious restriction to fair and free use. On the pro side, it means Apple’s hardware, which isn’t exactly cheap, remains desirable and thus profitable as it’s the only platform on which you can legally run the world’s best operating system. The case for the cons is that it helps Apple retain those unrealistic prices by blocking competitors like Dell and HP from building cheap Mac clones which, if you’re cash-strapped and don’t care what your computer looks like, is a bad thing indeed.
For my money though, I’m glad that the courts upheld the EULA and Psystar looks set for a resounding defeat. Not because I don’t want a cheap Mac (I do) and not because I have anything against Psystar at all, which I’m actually glad had a go at bucking the trend if for no other reason than to test the law.
No, the proceedings’ outcome was important because it protected not just Apple, but all hardware and software producers from a very unwelcome precedent. Had it gone the other way, there would be fair argument that another company should be allowed to strip out, tweak and re-sell the software in Sky+ boxes, making it available to anyone who refused to pay Sky’s prices. Want another example? How about mobile phones? A sector with such intense hardware homogeneity that the operating system is often the only clear differentiator. Would you want to see iPhone OS on a Motorola, Nokia or Sony Ericsson?
If the courts had ruled in Psystar’s favour, countless companies could have seen their profits diminished and, in the process, we would have seen competition falter and innovation stall.
Psystar may have lost this battle, but we should applaud its plucky approach for confirming, once and for all, the validity of the EULA.
