Apple accuses brothers Robert,
left, and Rudy Pedraza of copyright and
trademark infringement and breach of contract.
Posted on 07/21/2008 9:26:01 PM PDT by Swordmaker
A Doral company founded by two South Florida brothers has been sued by technology giant Apple, which is attacking the Mac clones the brothers started selling in April.
Attorneys for Apple are accusing Psystar Corp., owned by Rudy and Robert Pedraza, of copyright and trademark infringement and breach of contract for building and selling ''cloned'' computers that run on Apple's Leopard operating system.
In addition to monetary damages, Apple wants a court to force the Pedraza brothers to stop selling their clones and to recall every computer that has already been shipped to Psystar's customers.
The 35-page lawsuit was filed earlier this month in federal court in California and was served on Rudy Pedraza at Psystar's Doral headquarters on July 8, court records show.
''We take it very seriously when we believe people have stolen our intellectual property,'' Apple spokeswoman Susan Lundgren said Monday.
The Pedrazas have until July 28 to respond to the litigation. Attempts to reach the brothers for comment Monday via telephone and e-mail were unsuccessful. A call to their Miami attorney was not immediately returned.
In an interview with The Miami Herald in May, Rudy Pedraza talked about eventually selling the Mac clones in retail stores and moving into a bigger headquarters. He compared what he and his brother were doing to ``the Boston Tea Party of computing.''
''We are challenging the establishment to make the market better for everyone else,'' Pedraza said.
Rudy and Robert Pedraza, 24 and 22, grew up tinkering with computers and helping out at their parents' networking and IT business. They said they believed their clones offered an ideal package: faster, more powerful and less expensive than brand-name alternatives.
But Apple's licensing agreement prohibits using its software on non-Apple computers. For years, Apple had allowed clones of its computers, but CEO Steve Jobs shut that down when he took control of the company in 1997. Since then, Apple has been vigilant against Mac imitations.
So when Psystar's clones began hitting the marketplace, intellectual property lawyers and technology bloggers predicted it would only be a matter of time before Apple bit back.
''Apple had to sue,'' attorney Randy Friedberg said Monday from Olshan Law in New York, where he handles intellectual property and technology matters. ``They're very protective of their IP and their brand.''
Friedberg called the lawsuit ''far-reaching'' because of its demand to recall all computers Psystar has sold, which Apple estimates is in the thousands.
'I think Apple's goal was to say: `Don't screw with us,' '' Friedberg said. ``And I do believe they'll end up putting these kids out of business.''
"Apple could sell a Mac for $554 but they choose not to........." That's all I was responding to.
It breaks down when we know that Apple got paid for every copy of OS X that Psystar shipped. I don't know how Apple does the internal accounting, but they may have gotten paid more for each copy of OS X with a Psystar than when they ship a Mac loaded with OS X. I'm considering that retail generally costs more than pre-loaded.
Of course I still can't see why anyone would buy one of these, but that's a different issue.
But, Purp, they do sell a Mac for $599.
Joe and John are paying the cable company and the satellite company for the service they receive. They are merely reselling it...
The guy who was selling the DVDs ... well, he owns a digital camcorder small enough to sneak into a theater and taped the film off the screen. He paid for his ticket... he's just selling the experience he bought and paid for...
BTW I derived my FR name from my old purple I-MAC and the last syllable of my first name.
The cable and satellite companies don’t get paid for each person who receives the service provided by Joe and John, the studios don’t get paid for the copies of pirate DVDs sold. Apple got paid for each copy of OS X that Psystar shipped. Apple just didn’t like getting paid that way.
Correct. Here's the requisite car analogy.
I recall several years ago seeing numerous Nissan sports cars in the "for sale" section of the want ads for amazingly low prices. These cars had about 20K miles on them and were going for several thousand dollars below blue book price.
So I started looking into it. It seemed that they were a good deal up front, until you find out that they all needed tires.
Seems Nissan sold some cars with a proprietary wheel rim size. You could only get tires from one company and they wanted nearly a thousand dollars a tire.
Nissan created an artificial scarcity by introducing a proprietary requirement with no good technical reason.
Likewise, Apple requires EFI to boot OSX, although there isn't any technical reason to do so. They could have used the standard IBM-type BIOS or something like OpenPROM, but they chose to introduce an artificial, non-technical requirement in order to restrict what PCs their OS would boot from.
This is quite apparent when you see the hacks that allow OSX to boot on generic PC hardware.
BIOS is antiquated, that's technical reason enough. It's 16-bit, is tied to old AT hardware and can use only 1 MB of memory. Think if Nissan moved to new light-weight rims. EFI allows Macs to do things not available on PC BIOS systems.
BIOS is the main legacy left in PCs. Sun has Open Firmware, IBM has RTAS, Apple and Itanium systems use EFI, and there are others out there. Now that Vista finally recognizes EFI (Windows for Itanium was the only one that did before), expect to see BIOS slowly going away.
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