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Earlier this month, a lawyer representing Apple sent a takedown notice to Bluwiki.com, asking the website to remove pages that explained how to circumvent measures that Apple had put in place to prevent the use of third-party software to sync its portable devices, most notably on machines running Linux for which no version of iTunes is available.

“It has come to our attention that a website you operate, www.bluwiki.com, is disseminating information designed to circumvent Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management system,” wrote Ian Ramage, of law firm O’Melveny & Myers.

“FairPlay is considered anti-circumvention technology under the [US] Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA explicitly prohibits the dissemination of information that can be used to circumvent such technology.”

The EFF believes that Apple has no case. The DMCA prohibits the manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that may be used to circumvent DRM. But the EFF says that the text posted on the website was none of these.

“In

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fact, the authors had apparently not yet succeeded in their reverse engineering efforts and were simply discussing Apple's code obfuscation techniques,” says senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann.

Nor is reverse engineering the iTunesDB file a breach of copyright. iTunesDB is the file that the iPod uses to organise all its music files. It is by adding a small piece of code that Apple has prevented software other from reading the iTunesDB file, and therefore from syncing the iPod.

But since the iTunesDB file is created by the iPod user, as they sync their music, Lohmann argues that they own the copyright in the file.

“The iTunesDB file on every iPod is the result of the individual choices each iPod owner makes in deciding what music and other media to put on her iPod. In other words, the iTunesDB file is to iTunes as this blog post is to Safari—when I use Safari to produce a new work, I own the copyright in the resulting file, not Apple.”

Lohmann also believes that Apple’s case falls down because the DMCA specifically permits reverse engineering, if it is designed to enable interoperability of one software program with another.

“Enabling iPods to interoperate with ‘independently created computer programs’ (like gtkpod, Winamp and Songbird) is precisely what the reverse engineering exception was intended to protect,” Lohmann says.

“The reverse engineers presumably aren’t interested in making piratical copies of the iTunesDB file. Instead, they just want to sync their iPhones and iPods using software other than iTunes. No infringement there,” Lohmann concludes.

Apple does not comment on legal issues.