Ride of the Entitletards

So, the dip-shits at Psystar had their day in court, and the court punched them square in the junk. You can read all about the legal deci­sion at Groklaw. But I don’t want to write about the deci­sion itself. Suffice it to say that I agree with the Groklaw analy­sis. No, I want to com­ment on the absolutely exe­crable com­men­tary on the deci­sion from the retards at PC World.

As always with this sort of puke, the stu­pid starts right away with the headline:

Apple Wins Hollow Victory In Psystar Ruling

Really, a “hol­low vic­tory?” I rather imag­ine that Apple doesn’t see the absolute destruc­tion of Psystar as a “hol­low vic­tory.” Nor do I imag­ine that they’re any­thing but orgas­mic to have a court uphold their argu­ments regard­ing the enforce­abil­ity of the OS X End User License Agreement (EULA) as it per­tains to third-party resellers. So, over­all not so “hol­low” after all.

But the stu­pid don’t stop there. The first para­graph re-introduces us to an old friend:

A fed­eral judge has ruled in Apple’s favor in its law­suit against Mac-clone maker Psystar. Prevailing in the court bat­tle seems like it should be a good thing, but what Apple really gets out of the vic­tory is lim­ited mar­ket share poten­tial. Uhm, congratulations?

Oh fuck me run­ning, it’s our old buddy The Marketshare Myth. More ink, elec­trons and car­bon diox­ide have been spent dis­pelling this moronic “argu­ment” than it ever deserved. Apple has no inter­est in win­ning mar­ket­share. What they want to win is profit, and they seem to be doing that hand­ily. Moving on:

I don’t agree that Apple should have the abil­ity to restrict the hard­ware that I install the Mac OS X soft­ware on, but based on the appli­ca­tion of exist­ing laws I can under­stand why Apple won this case. The fact that Apple can lever­age exist­ing law to main­tain dra­con­ian con­trol over how its prod­ucts are used is a flaw with the laws and their appli­ca­tion, not with Apple.

Fortunately, the world is not beholden to what the jack­anapes at PC World do or don’t agree with. In fact, a Federal judge made it quite clear that Apple has every right to dic­tate what hard­ware its oper­at­ing sys­tem can and can’t run on. And what’s this twad­dle about “leverage[ing] exist­ing law.” Being right is not “lever­ag­ing” any­thing; it’s sim­ply being right. Psystar didn’t lose because Apple out-lawyered them. They lost because they broke the fuck­ing law. And one last thing about this para­graph: I hereby pro­claim that any dis­cus­sion of Apple that con­tains the phrase “dra­con­ian con­trol” is auto­mat­i­cally null and void. Call it Darby’s Law.

I don’t under­stand or agree with most copy­right law and EULA restric­tions as they per­tain to com­puter hard­ware and soft­ware. As far as I am con­cerned, Apple dic­tat­ing what hard­ware I can install Mac OS X on is like Doubleday Books telling me where I am allowed to read Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or like Sony restrict­ing me from play­ing The Taking of Pelham 123 on a Toshiba DVD player. Imagine if other indus­tries worked like that. Let’s use cars as an exam­ple. You pay $30,000 for the priv­i­lege of indef­i­nitely ‘bor­row­ing’ a Chevy Camaro, but General Motors reserves the right to tell you where you can park it. And, if you try to cus­tomize or mod­ify it in any way, like chang­ing the factory-default rims or installing a new stereo sys­tem, General Motors sues you for cre­at­ing a ‘deriv­a­tive work’. There would be riots.

Here’s a lit­tle les­son that most of us learned as wee chil­dren. If you don’t under­stand a topic, then shut the liv­ing fuck up about it. I don’t give a mouse’s fart whether you “agree with most copy­right law and EULA restric­tions as they per­tain to com­puter hard­ware and soft­ware.” The exam­ples then given to sup­port this retarded opin­ion are some of the worst exam­ples of just not fuck­ing get­ting it that I have ever seen. They’re so bad that I’m going to evis­cer­ate them one at a time.

First, the asi­nine book pub­lish­ing exam­ple. PC World makes the asser­tion that Apple’s EULA restric­tions are some­how the equiv­a­lent of a book pub­lisher restrict­ing you to where you can read a book. It’s hard to even prop­erly thrash this idiocy it’s so badly framed, prob­a­bly because the author doesn’t seem to have the fog­gi­est clue what it was that Psystar was doing. If you have to have a pub­lish­ing anal­ogy here it’s this: What Apple did was the equiv­a­lent of Doubleday Books pre­vent­ing a com­pany from buy­ing one copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol pho­to­copy­ing it a bunch of times, slap­ping it into a cover under the title Psystar’s The Lost Symbol and hawk­ing it on eBay. While I know for a fact that there are cer­tain free­tards out there who see noth­ing wrong with that, infor­ma­tion want­ing to be fweeee and all, the courts have his­tor­i­cally taken a dim view of it.

The sec­ond ill-conceived com­par­i­son is to Sony pre­vent­ing a movie (I’m going to assume that it’s one that Sony pub­lishes) from play­ing in a Toshiba DVD player. Again, it’s hard to prop­erly address these because they are so unre­lated to the actual sit­u­a­tion as to make them point­less. But to make an effort, dur­ing the BlueRay/HDVD for­mat war, there was plenty of con­tent that was exclu­sively avail­able in only one for­mat. Content pro­duc­ers are under no legal or moral oblig­a­tion to make shit con­ve­nient for you.

The last shitty com­par­i­son is so bad I need to quote it again:

Imagine if other indus­tries worked like that. Let’s use cars as an exam­ple. You pay $30,000 for the priv­i­lege of indef­i­nitely ‘bor­row­ing’ a Chevy Camaro, but General Motors reserves the right to tell you where you can park it. And, if you try to cus­tomize or mod­ify it in any way, like chang­ing the factory-default rims or installing a new stereo sys­tem, General Motors sues you for cre­at­ing a ‘deriv­a­tive work’. There would be riots.

Oh lordy a fuck­ing car anal­ogy. I should just dis­miss this out of hand because it’s a fuck­ing car anal­ogy but I’ll give it the old col­lege try. First, “…[y]ou pay $30,000 for the priv­i­lege of indef­i­nitely ‘bor­row­ing’ a Chevy Camaro, but General Motors reserves the right to tell you where you can park it…” Guess what numb-nuts, such a thing exists. It’s called a “lease,” and, much like a soft­ware license, leases come with terms and con­di­tions. You can’t just willy-nilly do crap to a vehi­cle you’re leas­ing if they vio­late the lease terms. Hell, even if you’re financ­ing a full pur­chase you will have lim­i­ta­tions on what you can do to the vehi­cle imposed by the finance company.

The sec­ond hor­ri­ble thing about this ridicu­lous com­par­i­son is that it con­fuses Apple’s trade­mark claims with it’s copy­right claims (hint, Psystar was vio­lat­ing both). The proper car anal­ogy here would be if Yugo was buy­ing Mercedes bod­ies, weld­ing them onto a Yugo frame with a Volga engine and mar­ket­ing them as Mercedys Bonzes. It dilutes Mercedes trade­mark, and Yugo would get their dicks slapped for doing it.

The rest of this hor­rid shit-smear of an arti­cle con­tin­ues on to make the usual enti­tle­tard mis­take of con­found­ing end users with a com­pany that delib­er­ately set out to turn a profit via the bril­liant tac­tic of will­ful copy­right and trade­mark abuse. Then throws in no less than two more instances of “DRACONIAN CONTROL” and ends on a fee­ble note about mar­ket share. All in all, a worth­less exer­cise by some­one with lit­tle to no grasp of the facts. In other words, all in a day’s work at PC World.