The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had teamed with OdioWorks lawyers to file a lawsuit against Apple Inc. in a federal court, claiming the company has stifling free speech by bullying OdioWorks into pulling content that shows how to use an iPod with stores other than iTunes. “I take the free speech rights of BluWiki users seriously,” said OdioWorks owner Sam Odio, owner of OdioWorks.
He continued: “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 problem Apple had was with the BluWiki site, which contained information on using the company’s iPhone and iPod products with stores other than iTunes.
BluWiki users edited it themselevs, sharing insights on reverse engineering Apple software to “manage their media with whatever program they chose.” However, late last year, the BluWiki site was shut down after Apple lawyers threatened to sue for spreading word of how to circumvent its digital rights management technology.
“Apple’s legal threats against BluWiki are about censorship, not about protecting their legitimate copyright interests,” said EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann. “It’s legal to engage in reverse engineering in order to create a competing product, it’s legal to talk about reverse engineering, and it’s legal for a public wiki to host those discussions.”
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Result for: legal threats
The infamous BitTorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay, is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. The site announced that is has reached 22 million peers this week, an increase of 10 million peers since April this year. Earlier this year, the tracker had set itself a goal of reaching 20 million peers and recently smashed that figure in much less time than was expected.
The site currently is host to over 3 million registered members and is evidently used by multiple times that figure. The site has survived attempts to shut it down from all angles, but its users have never suffered any major inconveniences or outages from those efforts. The site ridicules legal threats and other notices from legal reps of content companies and publishes them for all to see, and has had no problem standing up government pressure.
The site maintains that it is, and always has been operating legally since it does not offer any illegal content whatsoever to its users.
