Apple Sued for Threatening wiki Host over iTunes

There is a site that host for wiki covering iTunes database exploration had opted to fight back against repeated legal threats from Apple by suing the gadget giant in court on grounds of censorship. It is reported that the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) legal counsel helped site manager OdioWorks LLC file the lawsuit (PDF) in a Northern District of California court on Monday as a measure it said that it would help defend against “bogus” legal threats from Apple. OdioWorks is the site which actually runs the free and open wiki service BluWiki, wants to block Apple from constantly intimidating its own legal action merely for letting BluWiki users horde a wiki for iTunesDB, a project to learn about iTunes’ database file system and create third-party software that can imitate the sync functionality of iTunes for iPods and iPhones without forcing users to run Apple’s own media software. It is said that over the course of several months, Apple has declared the very existence of iTunesDB infringes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s rules on circumventing copyright locks and, in November, successfully frightened OdioWorks into taking-down the wiki entries. Now it’s the turn of the plaintiff to argue in its eleven pages complaint that it had only agreed to the initial demand to stay away from the lawsuit and that it believed BluWiki posters’ free speech rights are being violated by requests likened to outright censorship by both OdioWorks and the EFF. Sam Odio the founder of Odioworks said, “Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussions.” The EFF has specifically maintained that it’s fully legal to carry out overturn engineering for the purposes of fair-haired competition, such as allowing an iPhone to sync outside of iTunes. It also claims that OdioWorks’ verdict to run BluWiki as a non-profit and completely user-driven contented service should let off the company proper from mugging legal threats. No one writing the iTunesDB wiki had even deep-rooted that they had cracked the regulations, the lawsuit notes. It is reported that Odioworks and the EFF had further charged that Apple had been outright dishonest from technical standpoint when Apple insisted that reverse engineering a certain slice of memory copying code equated to an attempt to break fair play anti-piracy protection that until April of this year guarded a significant number of songs on the iTunes Store. If successful, the lawsuit would slab Apple from making any DMCA or other copyright claims against OdioWorks as well as legal fees and “any other relief” the California court believes is due.

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