Anti-trust law should apply to every company
Apple insists on dictating what you can do with your paid copy of MacOS. There should be a People Vs Apple lawsuit for this kind of behavior.
Labels: apple
posted by 1plaintext @ 12:20 AM
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
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6 Comments:
There is something called a license agreement. Apple wrote the software and only allow installation on Apple computers. That's their choice and so they remain small in the overall PC market. Microsoft did the exact opposite, allowing its software to install on all kinds of PC, but still, everything is written carefully in the license agreement - that's their business choice.
In the old days before anti-trust law, big corporates could just enter a market, sell (products that lock users into their brand) at a loss, choke out all the competitions, then raise the price sky high and make big profits. Microsoft can definitely do that: they can afford to sell windows PCs at a big loss that do not interop with anyother software/hardware, wait till all other companies die out, then monopolize the market...
except they cannot, this is what anti-trust law explicitly forbids...
Not everything can be excused as "business choice". There needs to be fairness when a publicly traded company sells to the mass.
So can Nintendo sue a game console maker for selling Wii knock-off that is compatible with Wii game software?
Nintendo can sue if someone is infringing the wii patents; on the otherhand, if someone actually took the time to reverse engineer it to make it compatible, by law, it is legal. There are plenty of precedence. That's why patents are so important.
Actually Atari reversed engineered Nintendo's very first console (the red-white-console) and made their game cartridge to avoid paying Nintendo licensing fee and Nintendo sued them. Atari lost and had to remove all their games on the market.
Back to your first comment post, I thought Apple was doing the exact opposite of what you described Microsoft had done - limiting what kind of PC could install OS X to protect themselves. And don't forget, before Steve Jobs joined Apple for the second time, Apple used to LICENSE their software to Taiwanese PC manufacturers to make Mac clones. That's the proper procedure.
I've always thought that software is a very touchy subject. You can't resell a store bought software (technically you could, but legally you can't) but you can resell all your other possession. Software is all about licensing. I don't see what's wrong with Apple if you agree the basic principle of software licensing - read and agree with the license before installing it. So what are we arguing here? Someone wrote a software license that you don't agree with?
Actually most software licensing agreements allow resell, legally, provided you do not retain a copy of anything... which is fair.
The point is, the license agreement has to be fair. The spirit of anti-trust law is to forbid business pratices, even otherwise legal ones, which are result of intentions to undercut competitions. It's also a moral thing in addition to a legal thing - you should only defeat your competitors by producing a better product (to the benefit of the masses) instead of marketing tricks or other ploys.
Intention is of course hard to prove... but having Apple sued the company shows their intention is to prevent competitors from entering the market of selling Macs (not because they are losing money, cause apparently those copies of MacOS are paid for). The fact that they are no longer licensing Mac designs to Mac clone manufacturers just reinforces that.
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