San Francisco (CA) – Psystar has hired a Texas-based law firm that has pledged to fight Apple with “guns blazin’.” The company was reportedly forced to jettison its previous legal team after racking up an $88,000 bill and declaring bankruptcy.
“Psystar has always been more a Cowboy than a Hippie. Now we’ve changed lawyers to better reflect who we are. Camara & Sibley LLP has officially become our primary legal counsel in our ongoing litigation with Apple,” Psystar confirmed in an official statement. “A new trial date has been set for January 11, 2010, in federal court in San Francisco. [The firm] will be ready to fight for Psystar, guns blazin’.”
Psystar also reiterated its claim that Club Cupertino’s OS X copyright didn’t “give Apple the right” to dictate terms of service.
“Apple can’t tell an applications developer that it can’t make a piece of Mac-compatible software. They can’t forbid Mac users from writing blogs critical of Apple. And they can’t tell us not to write kernel extensions that turn the computers we buy into Mac-compatible hardware.”
Apple originally accused Psystar of violating the Mac OS X licensing agreement and Digital Millennium Copyright Act by installing the operating system on PCs. For its part, Psystar claimed that “Apple…improperly leveraged its Mac OS copyrights in order to gain exclusive rights with respect to Mac OS-compatible computer hardware systems not granted in the Mac OS copyrights.”
A California court sided with Psystar on the copyright misuse claims, as Apple did not provide any reason “to bar the claims.” Nevertheless, Psystar’s accusations of “unfair” competition were rejected.
According to official court documents, Psystar failed “to explain […] how this conduct constitutes harm to competition or a violation of the spirit of the antitrust laws. In the context of single-firm conduct, tying requires monopolization. Psystar has identified none – other than the limited monopolies inherent in the copyrights themselves.”
It should be noted that Psystar has thus far declined TG Daily’s request to comment on reports that it is receiving financial assistance from anonymous sources.
