Mac Clone???

[Gregory Seidman]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 07:23:34AM -0400, John C. Welch wrote:
> On 4/15/08 10:06 PM, "Alex Satrapa" <grail at goldweb.com.au> wrote:
> 
> > On 16/04/2008, at 03:12 , Scott Roebuck wrote:
> >> Any thoughts?
> > 
> > It's a crappy PC in an ugly white mini-tower box. It's certainly not
> > a Mac.
> > 
> >> Do you think Apple will put the kibosh on this?
> > 
> > They won't need to.  The product will hang itself on it's own
> > crappiness.  Though perhaps I'm underestimating the average Windows
> > user's tolerance for random crashes and systems refusing to boot
> > after a software update.
> 
> Apple will have to, since their EULA explicitly forbids it, (Spare me the
> sophistry about writing "Apple Inc." on the computer, silliness with
> stickers, or stupidity about monopoly positions that show a complete
> misunderstanding about what a monopoly is). If they don't, then that creates
> a "Xerox" issue.

You're confusing copyright law with trademark law. A trademark owner is
obligated to protect its trademark in every case in order to have legal
standing to protect it in any case. (It's obviously a bit more complicated
than that, but that's the most basic level.) Apple, however, has a
copyright on MacOS X and the EULA is a copyright license. Copyrights can be
defended or not arbitrarily, and no failure to defend a copyright is
precedent for weakening that copyright claim. For the record, IANAL.

Now, it's a different story if this company attempts to claim that its
computers are "Apple-branded" and therefore do not violate the MacOS X
EULA. In that case, it can be argued that it has become a trademark issue
and Apple is obligated to bring suit or lose the Apple trademark. Given the
"gotcha!" aspect of trademark law, it may be in Apple's best interests to
kill it if there is even a whiff of possibility that it could be considered
trademark infringement. I believe this is why Sun Microsystems went and
sued a bunch of newspapers with the word "sun" in their titles some time
ago.

> John C. Welch         Writer/Analyst
--Greg