Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Apple Loses Copyright Claims Against Corellium

Juli Clover (docket PDF, Hacker News):

Apple last year sued Corellium for copyright infringement because the Corellium software is designed to replicate iOS to allow security researchers to locate bugs and security flaws.

According to The Washington Post, a Florida judge threw out Apple’s claims that Corellium had violated copyright law with its software. The judge said that Corellium successfully demonstrated that it operates under fair use terms.

[…]

Apple has also said that Corellium circumvented Apple’s security measures to create its software and violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that claim has not been tossed out.

Miguel de Icaza:

The natural next step: Amazon offer iOS on the cloud, and you can remote login to your secured iOS devices on your cloud. I am surprised by the ruling, but it opens a whole new world of businesses out there (both monetizing iOS and monetizing all sorts of other software)

Previously:

I can see why Apple fought this, but it also seems right that they lost.

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Daniel A. Shockley

"it opens a whole new world of businesses out there (both monetizing iOS and monetizing all sorts of other software)"

The judge's decision, broad as it is in some ways, does not seem to warrant this statement. The decision was, of course, a very case-specific analysis of the fair use defense. It's hard to see how a commercial "iOS-in-the-cloud" service for general use would militate as strongly in favor of fair use as security research does. That's a pretty specific difference that the judge's discussion of the facts indicates would fail to win.


Ah well. De Icaza knows a lot about monetizing software that belongs to other people. And lets be practical here. The copyright claim is tossed out. I wonder what fair use terms the judge found applicable.

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