Apple Legal Issues Cease & Desist Over Service Manual Posting
Apple Legal Issues Cease & Desist Over Service Manual Posting
by , 2:45 PM EDT, May 4th, 2006
Apple's legal department has issued a cease and desist notice to the webmaster of the Web site Something Awful, insisting that he remove a link to a MacBook Pro service manual posted by a forum member.
Many owners of the new computer have complained that it runs unbearably hot, as The Mac Observer detailed on Wednesday. The forum member shared the link as part of an explanation of how to reduce the amount of thermal paste inside the laptop, which has been blamed for the excessive heat. The Web site OSx86 Project has even gone so far as to call for a protest day on May 20, when all owners of faulty MacBook Pro laptops are supposed to flood Apple's support center with phone calls.
According to the notice, which was posted in the forum thread, an Apple Legal representative said: "The Service Source manual for the MacBook Pro is Apple's intellectual property and is protected by U.S. copyright law. Linking to the manual on your website is an infringement of Apple's copyrights. We therefore must insist that you immediately take all necessary steps to remove the Service Source manual and any other Apple copyrighted material from your site and to prevent further unauthorized use or distribution of Apple intellectual property."
Apple sent the notice on Tuesday, and Something Awful's webmaster said he had "told them to basically screw off." He received a form letter in response and has yet to hear anything since then.
According to Macworld UK, Apple has also started recalling some MacBook Pro batteries because of issues with some of them losing their charges faster than they should. The site said that computers with serial numbers less than W8608 are affected. Anyone with a serial number starting with W8609 or higher should have a fully functioning battery.
Observer Comments
The link is to "hakujin.info" which probably does not have permission to post the Apple manual in PDF form. If that site isn't owned by the SA guys, then Apple Legal has kind of stepped on its collective d--k trying to enforce its copyright. But then again, maybe they've decided to pick a fight over this particular kind of linking in unsupervised forums. In which case, the SA guy's response was pretty stupid.
It sure would help if Apple would get a real engineer's opinion on this whole thermal goo thing. If they've made a mistake, own it and fix it. If this is just amateurs redirecting heat from the case to internal parts that shouldn't be getting so hot, then point that out. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between leaning toward Apple's side.
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