Apple sued, accused of censorship

After documents were published on discussion and information website BluWiki last year detailing the reverse engineering of the iPhone and iPod touch to allow the devices to operate with third party music software (effectively shedding the iTunes albatross), Apple sent a legal letter to the site operator OdioWorks demanding the article be removed.

At the time, OdioWorks complied with Apple’s legal threat, but the case has since been championed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which just filed a complaint in US courts accusing Apple of breaching OdioWorks's First Amendment rights to free speech.

“I take the free speech rights of BluWiki users seriously,” says owner of OdioWorks, Sam Odio. “Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussions.”

Naturally there’s no word from Apple on this issue, but this apparently small matter could actually grow into a significant problem for the iPhone manufacturer. Should the case go ahead, and the practice of unshackling the iPhone and iPod touch from iTunes be considered reverse engineering rather than copyright infringement, Apple’s vice like grip on the device could slip.

“What this guy was doing was legitimate,” Odio continues. “He was just trying to reverse engineer Apple's products to try to get them to work with Linux and other third-party software.”

There’s no denying that iTunes works, but it’s a bloated and clumsy piece of software that a lot of iPhone and iPod touch users would happily leave behind - at least in terms of music and video management on their handsets.

We’ll keep you posted on how the law suit progresses.