Angus Kidman03 December 2008, 12:00 PM
Here's another tactic to add to the long list of ways to annoy Steve Jobs: try and build an application that syncs with the iPhone or iPod Touch.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is crying foul after Apple sought to have a discussion on a technical forum about how to access and sync information on the sibling devices shut down, claiming that it violated the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (AKA "having a technologically illiterate US president has its advantages").
According to legal letters posted on the bluwiki site, Apple demanded that discussions of how to calculate the checksum used in the main iTunes information storage database be removed, claiming that it was an attempt to circumvent its FairPlay DRM — a legal offence under the DMCA.
By the EFF's analaysis, that's a huge heap of garbage: "Apple doesn't have a DMCA leg to stand on," wrote EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann.
The argument centres around the iTuneDB file, which is an index of all the media stored on a given iPhone or iPod. Since September 2007, Apple has used a checksum when writing to the file, which makes it harder for third-party applications to update the iPod unless they know the means by which it's calculated. The original checksum was reverse-engineered quickly, but Apple has recently updated the mechanism and is now aggressively trying to stop people working out its secrets, if the bluwiki experience is any guide.
In his analysis, von Lohmann argues that any attempt to reverse-engineer the checksum mechanism doesn't qualify as an attempt to circumvent DRM, pointing out that people are entitled to reverse-engineer to ensure interoperability, that no actual techniques were identified in the original posts, and that the copyright in the actual file arguably resides with the device owner, not Apple. The EFF is now involved in what we can assume are quite heated discussions with Apple's lawyers.
Apple's hyper-controlling attitude to its best-selling portable devices is well known, and extends beyond copyright control. Third-party applications in certain categories — such as those which try and use the iPhone as a modem for PC access — are pretty much guaranteed to be blocked from the iTunes App Store.
On the other hand, that approach hasn't made much practical difference. Every release of iPhone 2-series firmware has been followed in quick succession by software that can 'jailbreak' the phone, opening it up to a much wider range of applications that don't need the Apple stamp of approval. While Apple's engineers have apparently worked to block those efforts, success so far has been minimal.
Of course, there's an upside to that controlled approach: applications are less likely to bring the phone to a shuddering halt. But the fact that after every iPhone firmware release, there's been a small but visible group of people whose phones have experienced extended syncing and other issues shows that Apple can't claim perfection in this area either.
(For the record, other ways to annoy Mr Jobs include publishing any information about a new product before he's had the chance to make a speech about it, running an international record label or pointing out just how badly MobileMe sucked when it launched.)