Why Palm’s WebOS ‘Media Sync’ iTunes Integration CAN Be Legit
Tuesday 2nd June 2009In terms of legal risk, this move almost makes me think that Palm is trying to provoke Apple into filing a lawsuit. The danger for Palm in such a suit is with all of the former Apple engineers now working for Palm. (There are many.) Did they use inside knowledge of the iPod/iTunes USB interface to implement the WebOS “media sync” feature? Palm’s not stupid — or at least Jon Rubinstein is not — so I would wager that Palm was careful to “clean-room” reverse-engineer the protocol. But if Apple sues, Palm would be forced to prove this in court, and in the meantime, they could be faced with the public perception that they’ve stolen Apple’s IP.
It’s one thing for Apple not to facilitate syncing with 3rd-party (non-Apple) players, but another altogether to actively go out of their way to stop it happening. Can you imagine the fallout if Microsoft were to add code into the SMB protocol that blocked access to non-Microsoft systems?
Apple effectively monopolises the portable media player market, and if they resort to Microsoft-in-the-90s style tactics to hold on to that monopoly, they could find themselves on the wrong side of the US Department of Justice.
I suspect Apple won’t take any “official” action to prevent Palm’s reverse-engineered syncing, since that would be anti-competitive. What they might do is release an iTunes software update that “accidentally” breaks the Palm syncing engine. If this were to happen, it would be extremely difficult for Palm to prove, in a legal sense, that Apple had deliberately broken compatibility. From an ethical point of view however, there would be no ambiguity.
Wednesday 3rd June 2009 at 12:18 pm
On the other side of the coin, you’ve also got Palm who may/may not have taken what was intellectually Apple’s to begin with (and by this I mean the whole Pre syncs with iTunes thing).
How is this any different, then, to Apple breaking apps in the App Store because they’re using unpublished/private iPhone APIs?
Phrased differently, if Apple were to ‘accidentally’ break that functionality, it’s no different to them breaking some apps in the App Store, simply because they’re using those undocumented/private APIs to begin with, right?
Wednesday 3rd June 2009 at 2:53 pm
Having had a brief look into how the older iPods stored their music files, I don’t think it would have been that hard to reverse-engineer the syncing system. Not trivial, but not a massive undertaking. I don’t see how Apple could claim an IP violation unless they have a patent over the syncing mechanism. I don’t know if they have such a patent – if they do, how defendable the patent is would be debatable. But I’m not a lawyer, I’m a developer, and as such I would hope that such a patent is undefendable. I could be wrong.
There are valid reasons to prevent apps that use private APIs from making it to the App Store that have nothing to do with anti-competitive behaviour. There’s no reason for Apple to tread lightly from a legal or ethical point of view on that issue. As a developer, when you use a private API, you are taking a huge risk. If you don’t safeguard your code to not break if/when the private API breaks, then it’s your fault, not Apple’s.
The slightly different issue of Apple blocking apps because they duplicate functionality of the inbuilt iPhone apps opens up a whole different can of worms.