No place like Clone
Mac clone maker Psystar has sued Apple for a second time,
charging that it illegally ties the new Snow Leopard operating system to its
hardware.
The outfit, which is being sued by Apple for breaching
rules on what its operating system can do, also asked a federal judge in
Florida to rule that the small company has the right to purchase copies of Snow
Leopard on the open market and use them to install Mac OS X 10.6 on the
machines it sells.
Psystar's lawsuit
said that by tying its operating system to Apple-branded hardware,
Apple
restrains trade in personal computers that run Mac OS X, collects
monopoly
rents on its Macintoshes, and monopolises the market for 'premium
computers'. It pointed to an NPD finding that Apple's share of revenue
in the market for premium
computers is 91 per cent.
The antitrust angle in the new lawsuit is a repeat of
Psystar's strategy of more than a year ago, when it accused Apple of violating
the Sherman and Clayton Acts. A federal judge in California tossed out
Psystar's claims.
The outfit argues that this time Snow Leopard is
completely different. The technical mechanisms used by Apple to tie Mac OS X
Snow Leopard to Macintoshes and the technology used by Psystar to get Mac OS X
Snow Leopard to run on Psystar computers are new and different and not within
the scope of the California litigation, it says.