Apple sues Psystar, which makes Mac ‘clones’
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jul 15, 2008 at 12:18pm
It was just a matter of time. Apple has sued Psystar, the company that for months has been selling the Open Computer, a Mac clone, reports CNET. The article says Apple is suing the company for violating its intellectual property rights.
The suit was filed July 3 in U.S. District Court in Northern California. Although the action is listed in the federal court’s electronic filing system, the complaint itself is not available, notes CNET.
Psystar announced on April 14 that it was planning to ship a US$399 expandable tower that is a “Leopard compatible Mac built from standard PC-parts and taking advantage of the osx86project to accomplish the task.” And last month the company announced a line of OpenServe rack-mount servers compatible with server operating systems such as Mac OS X Leopard Server, Microsoft Server 2003/2008, CentOS and Ubuntu Server.
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Johnny Cochran Says:
With all the money Apple has in the bank, they can always “buy” an iJury like we did fior OJ.
Posted on July 16, 2008
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
J. Scott Anderson Says:
I was wondering how long it would take for Apple to get everything aligned the way they want for a filing. I’ll bet that they see this opportunity as more than just a single problem to solve–rather this is a chance to set the undesirable cloners back on their heels, in order to discourage others from doing the same. My bet is that they are going to make this case a lesson for the rest of the possible cloners to learn.
That said, I can see a large amount of risk here. If Apple were to lose, it would mean an opening of the floodgates for a whole host of cloners. That is something that could eat into Apple’s hardware profits in a meaningful way.
So…either business continues as usual (Apple win) or the entire Apple business model gets shaken to its core (Apple loses). Either way, this will be interesting to watch.
Posted on July 15, 2008