Apple Inc. and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) agreed to drop the copyright violation charges against operators of Bluwiki website in the condition that the EFF will also drop lawsuits it has filed against Apple.
In a report, O’Melveny & Myers, the legal counsel of Apple earlier said that Bluwiki has violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) after the website has “reverse-engineered” the elemental design of Digital Rights Management (DRM) which was copyrighted by Apple.
O’Melveny & Myers also said that the mere fact that the website company has circumvented the file protection aspect of the DMCA can be constituted as a violation of the copyright law.
It will be recalled that Apple went after Bluwiki’s iPodhash project, which sought to reverse-engineer the technology that it has developed. The website company has also created a wiki pages especially designed for the distribution of information about the said project.
Apple tried to suppress Bluwiki’s freedom of speech when it went after the said wiki pages, EEF said.
These attacks to Bluwiki, caught the attention of the EFF, which then filed a case against Apple, saying that no DMCA violation was committed.
Meanwhile, EFF Senior counsel Fred von Lohmann said that it has decided to withdraw the charges against Apple to let all parties involved to move forward and put the past behind.
However, Lohmann said that they are very disappointed with Apple, saying that it took seven months before the company come to its senses.
Also, the counsel said that they expect to see Apple in the near future following moves by the company to use technical measure in locking customers and other iPhone and iPod Touch users in using iTunes software.
The move will also lock pre owners of Palm device into iTunes.