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Apple Sends Cease and Desist Email to Public Wiki Site, Bluwiki
MacBlogz - One Stop Apple News — ... EFF explains: At the heart of this is the iTunesDB file, the index that the iPod operating system uses to keep track of what playable media is on the device. Unless an application can write new data to this file, it won’t be able to “sync” music or other content to an iPod. The iTunesDB file has never been encrypted and is relatively well understood. In iPods released after September 2007, however, Apple introduced a checksum hash to make it difficult for applications other than iTunes to write new data to the iTunesDB file, thereby hindering an iPod ...

EFF berates Apple over open-source iTunes project
Macworld — ... Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA explicitly prohibits the dissemination of information that can be used to circumvent such technology." Bluwiki's founder, Sam Odio, complied with the takedown request, but in an interview Tuesday he said that iPodhash's developer is not trying to get around Apple's copy protection. "He's not developing software to unencrypt the songs," he said. "What he's actually doing is unencrypting the database." Here's how the EFF explained the matter in a posting to its blog Tuesday by senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann: In September 2007, Apple ...

EFF berates Apple over open-source iTunes project
MacBytes.com — ... Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA explicitly prohibits the dissemination of information that can be used to circumvent such technology." Bluwiki's founder, Sam Odio, complied with the takedown request, but in an interview Tuesday he said that iPodhash's developer is not trying to get around Apple's copy protection. "He's not developing software to unencrypt the songs," he said. "What he's actually doing is unencrypting the database." Here's how the EFF explained the matter in a posting to its blog Wednesday by senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann: In September 2007, ...

Bob Says… Let’s Not Give Thanks for the EFF
Apple Eclectic — ... You may have read that the EFF [Electronic Freedom Foundation] has spoken out against Apple’s gagging of a bunch of ‘hackers’ planning to heist the iTunes music database. Or you may have better things to do with your time. God knows I do, and this is meant to be my job. Anyway, “Apple Confuses Speech with a DMCA Violation” scream the EFF. Allow me to provide a quick glossary for the slower amongst you. By “speech” they mean freedom of speech, as enshrined in the first amendment to their beloved Constitution, and by ...

Apple Confuses Speech with a DMCA Violation
The Apple Core — ... demanding the removal of postings by users who are trying to figure out how to write software that can sync media to the latest versions of the iPhone and iPod touch. According to the EFF : Apple doesn’t have a DMCA leg to stand on. At the heart of this is the iTunesDB file, the index that the iPod operating system uses to keep track of what playable media is on the device. Unless an application can write new data to this file, it won’t be able to “sync” music or other content to an iPod. The iTunesDB file has never been encrypted and is ...

Apple attempts to silence iPhone hack discussion
APC — ... , Apple demanded that discussions of how to calculate the checksum used in the main iTunes information storage database be removed, claiming that it was an attempt to circumvent its FairPlay DRM a legal offence under the DMCA. By the EFF's analaysis , that's a huge heap of garbage: "Apple doesn't have a DMCA leg to stand on," wrote EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann. The argument centres around the iTuneDB file, which is an index of all the media stored on a given iPhone or iPod. Since September 2007, Apple has used a checksum when writing to the file, which makes it ...

Apple Shows Us DRM's True Colors
MacBytes.com — Apple uses DRM to lock iPhones to AT&T and Apple's iTunes App Store; Apple uses DRM to prevent recent iPods from syncing with software other than iTunes (Apple claims it violates the DMCA to reverse engineer the hashing mechanism); Apple claims that it uses DRM to ...

Hardware DRM: Has Apple Joined the Dark Side?
Cult of Mac — ... , the authentication chip was then derided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as Apple’s attempt to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act not to stop piracy, but to impede competition and innovation. ...

Big Brother Apple Sued For Thuggish Trampling of Free Speech
Silicon Alley Insider — ... (.pdf) against Apple claims no law was broken by BluWiki because the writers of the wiki threads “had apparently not yet succeeded in their reverse engineering efforts and were simply discussing Apple’s code obfuscation techniques,” writes Fred von Lohmann, an EFF attorney. “If Apple is suggesting that the DMCA reaches people merely talking about technical protection measures, then they’ve got a serious First Amendment problem.” ...

Apple is being accused of stifling free speech; again
The Apple Core — ... file in 6th-gen iPods, but it was quickly reverse-engineered. They changed it with the release of iPhone 2.0 and a project was started to reverse the new hash, but wasn’t successful yet. My guess is Apple used the same algorithm as FairPlay for the new hash, so Apple could use the DMCA to prevent competing apps like Songbird and Banshee from talking to iPods/iPhones. BTW, don’t tell Apple, but the project uses a wiki, so the old page versions from before the takedown are still there.” EFF explains: At the heart of this is the iTunesDB file, the index that the iPod operating ...