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by modeless 905 days ago
That's why there's are exemptions to copyright for interoperability reasons. You can't hide behind copyrights (or trademarks) solely to exclude competitors. (I believe Beeper uses this library solely for registration, not normal operation.) Such tactics have lost in court multiple times.
1 comments
tinus_hn 904 days ago
That’s a totally different kind of case where the barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce copyrighted content, like in the case of the DSMOS chip which contains a poem which has to be provided for the OS to work. These tactics have sometimes been successful and sometimes been unsuccessful. It’s just the legal lottery.

Here they simply provide someone else’s library to perform the authentication. That’s just basic copyright infringement, however lofty the goal.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/858511/what-is-com-apple...

https://www.theregister.com/2003/08/11/habeas_cans_spammer/

You can’t write an emulator and sell it including the bios written by Sony. Has been enforced many times. Similarly, you can’t do what Beeper is doing here.

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modeless 904 days ago
> the barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce copyrighted content

This is exactly the case here. The barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce this obfuscated code which, crucially, serves no other purpose. Even if it would be theoretically possible to achieve interoperability otherwise by heroic reverse engineering of said code, that doesn't matter just as it didn't matter in Sega v. Accolade where that exact argument was made unsuccessfully by Sega.

This is not analogous to reproducing a whole BIOS which is not obfuscated code and is used for miscellaneous purposes having nothing to do with access restriction. This is clearly fair use according to precedent.

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tinus_hn 904 days ago
If you think copying an authorization library is ‘obfuscated code which serves no other purpose’ you’re just wrong and this discussion is pointless.

Ultimately either Apple will successfully block Beeper permanently or they will DMCA them and the courts will have their say. We’ll see.

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