From the company goes overboard with lawsuits department (also know as the Apple Desk): ArsTechnica is reporting on a a couple people being sued for mistakenly having the upcoming Tiger OS leaked onto public BitTorrent sites. Apple is suing the pants off a college student who has around $200 in his bank account. He basically says he was sorry and that he only thought it would be distributed to five or six friends in the invite-only MacTKA community. Perhaps he is being dishonest, but he clearly has a poor understanding of what p2p networks will do with hot networks (distribute them everywhere).

Still, as half the Mac development community (including Apple co-founder Wozniak) has testified, Apple is doing more harm than is deserved to this student–and their reputation. A good company would realize the honest confession of his actions as well as the stress he has endured is more than enough for putting a file up for distribution for an hour. Especially given the fact that Apple’s recent stock gains are entirely contributed to illegal downloads of music files. How many 40GB iPods has Apple sold? Far more than the number of people who have purchased 500 albums on CD and MP3. Can Apple honestly say that 8.2 million people own the rights to 60, 120, 250 or 500 albums? They need to be more considerate towards pirates given that they make up the majority of the iPod user (and therefore the Apple financial) base.

This entry was posted on 2005-2-23 at 2:41 and is filed under Apple/Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.