Feeding the troll, I know, but what the hell..

Yes. Apple does have a right to a monopoly on Apple-branded computers. The Coca-Cola corporation has a right to a monopoly on Coke. Nike has a right to a monopoly on Nike running shoes.

The whole purpose of patent, copyright, and trademark is to grant a monopoly on ideas, expressions of ideas, and icons associated with a specific company.

If you want a computer whose OS is just as good as OS X, you have every right in the world to go out and write one. Apple can't do shit to stop you. You can sell it for profit, or just give it away if you want. You might even create a license that requires people who use and modify your code to release their own modifications so that other people can continue to share the wealth.

That's what we call "a competitive market."

Taking work that someone else spent the time and money to create, then using it to compete against them, is called "being a huge flaming asshole" ... a concept you've obviously mastered. If you do it in contradiction to the terms of the license -- the one whose validity is defined in terms of the monopoly granted by patent, copyright, or trademark -- that's called "illegal."

There's both a legal and ethical difference between "I'm willing to share everything I have with you," and "I'm willing to share everything you have."

The unit cost of OS X is irrelevant.

Apple doesn't sell OS X for non-Apple-branded hardware, and Psystar doesn't sell copies of OS X per se. Psystar isn't taking any money out of Apple's pocket in a software market for 'copies of OS X', because no such market exists.

The place where Psystar is taking money out of Apple's pocket is in hardware. The difference between "an Apple-branded computer running OS X" and "a Psystar-branded computer running OS X" is the machine itself, not the OS. Therefore, the damage to Apple is the cost of equivalent hardware less the cost of one retail copy of OS X. Apple's retail computer prices are public knowledge, so adding up the damages would be trivial.

That's only where Psystar's barbed-wire enema begins, though. The big money will be in 'brand dilution'.

Apple's brand is immensely valuable, and Psystar has been trying to redefine it. Apple has always presented itself as a company that sells "the whole widget." They've spent a lot of money in every aspect of their business, from R&D to manufacturing, to sales and support, pushing the idea that a box from Apple is a single unit that Just Works (TM). Then along comes Psystar, telling everyone that Apple is really just a component vendor, whose OS division is just like Microsoft and whose hardware division is just like Dell. If you want an "Apple compatible computer," you can pick and choose pieces from any vendors you want.

A large part of this case revolves around whether Psystar has a legitimate right to tell the whole world what business Apple is in. At present, it looks like the answer to that is a big, fat "No."

If a court rules that Psystar has indeed been blowing smoke out its ass, then the equivalent advertising cost of every square inch of newsprint or second of airtime devoted to covering this case in the public view can be treated as damage to Apple. Every "they can't tell me what to do with the OS after I've bought the box" comment in these threads counts as noise that Apple will have to spend time, effort, and money arguing against. That time, effort, and money are resources Apple could otherwise have spent writing more software, designing new hardware, or otherwise expanding or improving its business. Psystar would have imposed an operating expense on Apple without having any legal right to do so. And following the theory that "if you light the fire, you can be held liable for whatever gets burnt," the court can rule that Psystar owes Apple the cost of cleaning up the mess it created.

Good point, but I personally think Visicalc tipped the scale in Apple's favor.

Visicalc was the killer app that made buying a micro worthwhile, at least in the business market (which was the only 'real' computer market in those days). For a couple thousand bucks, a company manager could buy an Apple ][ and Visicalc and have the power of The Spreadsheet at his disposal. That was a big deal back then, especially since you could run a calculation in real time (read: 5-15 minutes) rather than having to submit a batch job to the computer department and get the results back tomorrow at best.

IBM got interested in the microcomputer market when it learned that middle managers were smuggling Apple ][s into their offices so they could crunch numbers. That presented a challenge to IBM's core market, and by the time anyone admitted that it was happening, it was happening in a fairly big way.

Cloning a PC wouldn't be legal either if IBM hadn't screwed the pooch on getting the first product to market.

First of all, IBM massively underestimated the potential for growth of a microcomputer market. They held the idea that Big Iron was the only true definition of computing, and that things like the Apple ][ were hobbyist toys that would never amount to anything. They made the further mistake of assuming that if a market for 'toy' computers did start to become worthwhile, they'd have plenty of time to develop and ship their own product.

They were wrong in both cases.

When IBM finally decided to sell a PC, they were of the opinion that Apple was 6-12 months from getting a lock on the microcomputer market. If IBM couldn't put a product on the shelves by that time, there wouldn't be much point in trying.

So they tasked an engineer with the job of creating enough of a product to hold a space in the market while the designers put together something really good. Being a good engineer, he did a baseline critical path analysis, and learned that with all the forms, paperwork, and meetings, it would take something like 18 months to ship an empty box with "IBM PC" printed on it. Actually designing a computer to put in the box, shopping for parts suppliers, building an assembly plant, and all those other little details would just push the ship time farther out.

So, faced with the choice between losing a new market entirely or skirting around standard procedures, he proposed a radical plan: design a machine out of off-the-shelf parts, and contract third-party assembly shops to do the construction. That would allow IBM to put a product on the shelves within the 6-12 month deadline, but it would also create an enormous risk: anyone else who wanted to enter the market would be able to do exactly the same thing just as quickly, and just as easily. In fact, it would be even cheaper and easier for the me-too competitors, because they could skip the R&D phase and copy IBM's hardware design more or less verbatim (a process that came to be known as 'cloning').

So they built the whole thing around a chip which could only be sold by IBM: the BIOS.

The BIOS was a computer program burned into ROM. IBM held the copyright on the program, so nobody could legally duplicate that chip. But the BIOS was also tightly integrated with the hardware. Without it, the rest of the computer was just a box of random components. But those components were arranged in such a specific way that it would be hell to try to design a compatible product that wouldn't require IBM's BIOS to run. In one version of the fantasy, IBM wouldn't have to build computers at all, they'd just license BIOS chips to all the other companies that wanted to build hardware.

Then along came a company called Compaq, which reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS, and built a legally clean BIOS of their own from the reverse-engineered spec.

IBM sued, and lost. Compaq's legal team had done its homework on maintaining the 'virginity' of the coders who wrote the cloned BIOS.

At THAT point, IBM lost all control of the PC hardware market. And since their OS had also been outsourced to a little company up in Seattle, they didn't have any hooks left in the product.

So in answer to your question: it's legal to clone a PC because IBM was lumbering, stupid, arrogant, in a big hurry, and not thinking very clearly when it spent tons of money pushing a design into the market that could be ganked away from them almost overnight. In the process, they handed half of their market dominance to Microsoft (whose OS became the only thing that made the hardware a 'PC') and the other half to cloners like Compaq.

Those "consumers who are always right" are the ones who want Hollywood movies in high definition, regardless of what technical encumbrances are baked into the formats and licensing deals. They want music players full of music from the big five's catalogs, and generally don't care about DRM as long as it doesn't get too much in their way.

If consumers were lining up with money in hand to buy DRM-free products, and collectively saying a big "screw you" to the RIAA/MPAA by refusing to buy the latest music and movies as long as they were encumbered by DRM, Apple would no doubt tell the RIAA/MPAA to shove their DRM clauses up their collective ass.

Apple has already held tough on issues like flexible song pricing, and was willing to play chicken with NBC over "flexible video pricing plus bundling," so I think they've earned the right to say they'll act in the consumer's best interest.

If consumers in their millions aren't interested in what you think is 'best', then I guess it just sucks to be you.

--- You are partly right, but surely the issue is, they have no right to restrict what A RETAIL COPY OF OSX is installed on.

Of course they do.

Copyright law says that by default, the creator of a work has all the rights that exist in regard to the created work. By default, no one else has any rights to the work at all.

If anyone but the creator has any rights to the work, those rights have to have been granted by the creator. Period.

If you don't have some kind of document that says the creator has given you a specific right, you don't have that right. Period.

The rights that the creator gives you are called a 'license', and the creator can put any terms into the license he wants, as long as those terms don't break some other law. There's nothing in the law that says those terms have to be fair, or to your liking. 'Fair' is too hard for the law to define, and if you don't like the creator's terms, you have the options of negotiating other terms, or not buying the license and accepting the fact that you have no rights to the work at all.

License terms that tell you what you can do with a product after you've bought it are called 'performance restrictions', and performance restrictions are utterly legal.

The GPL and most OSS licenses are nothing but a big bundle of performance restrictions. You can't take a piece of GPL'd code and use it in a closed-source product by saying, "hey, I bought A RETAIL COPY OF LINUX. You have no right to tell me what I can do with the code after I've bought it."

You're joking, right?

Apple hates DRM because it takes a shitload of time, money, and effort to design and implement, and an even bigger shitload of time, money, and effort to show 'plausible efforts' to keep it working once it's deployed. Anyone who tries to do DRM simply agrees to climb on a treadmill of trying to stay a fractional step ahead of the people who will break the protection.

Apple hates DRM because DRM is inherently futile. You simply can't build a system that puts both the lock and the key in the hands of the end user, then impose rules on what the user can do with those two pieces.

Apple hates DRM because the longer DRM is allowed to exist, the longer the content cartel will continue to make this massive, futile investment a requirement for any access to content. Apple especially hates DRM because it puts the content owners in a position where they can say, "I don't have to know how it works, or whether it's even possible. I have the power to say what has to be done, and making it happen is your job. And thanks to the laws that we've bought and the contracts we've written, if you don't manage to do the impossible to our satisfaction, we can sue the shit out of you then nail you on criminal charges."

Apple hates DRM because using DRM simply manufactures enemies with the technical knowledge to rip apart any technical measures Apple tries to build. And while defeating DRM may be a socially acceptable goal, a lot of that knowledge can potentially be reapplied to general malware.

Apple hates DRM because it sucks for the user. Remember: Apple doesn't make money licensing its OS to a bunch of OEMs who then try to sell a product to consumers, or with massive, umpty-thousand-seat software licensing deals. Consumer dissatisfaction hits Apple in the pocket much harder than it hits Microsoft. On top of that, Apple sells in the premium-priced segment of the market, where people are willing to say, "if I have to put up with something that sucks, I can buy another product for a whole lot less."

It would take Apple a hell of a lot less effort to make a product that users like a hell of a lot more if they could ditch DRM. Given that less than 1% of all the music on iPods was purchased through the iTunes store, the idea that Apple sees some kind of benefit from consumer lock-in just doesn't scan.

The only upside of DRM is that it gives Apple access to the content cartel's catalog. And tens of millions of consumers voting with their dollars have said that they prefer devices that do have DRM and cartel content over devices free from DRM that don't have cartel content.

So in the long run, it comes down to a question of philosophy versus economics. If you hate DRM so much you won't buy a Mac, iPod, or iPhone, so be it. The few thousand people who agree with you on that score are less valuable to Apple than the 15-20 million who will buy new DRM-encumbered Macs, iPods, and iPhones in the next quarter.