what _did_ you do to them?
What on _Earth_ did you people do to piss 'em off?
Apple and Snow Leopard take-downs - just say no
On Tuesday evening UK time The Register received a take-down notice from San Francisco lawyers acting on behalf of Apple. Our hosting company, Rackspace, received a similar notice, Apple's beef being that The Register had posted "confidential trade secrets" in our First Look at Snow Leopard. You will notice that we have not …
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get a grip....
First off i own a mac..
Get a fuckin grip apple it was a good informative article promoting your newest product.
God for bid aanyone should mention your name these days without expressed written consent from you.
I see
Getting a DCMA take down notice from Apple? There's an app for that!.
Dear God
Do try to avoid dislocating your shoulders while slapping yourself on the back so fiercely.
I do hope
That your reply to them referenced Arkle vs Pressdram...
I'm in the wrong office
Lots of amusing letters going around today!
Re: I do hope
I considered referencing General Tony McAuliffe vs OKW (1944) or Pierre Cambronne vs British Army (1815), but the latter at least seemed inauspicious, so I didn't. (-:
Standard reply
"We feel that our position was most eloquently argued in Arkell vs. Pressdram."
They are short-sighted idiots...
... I ended up ordering snow leopard right after reading the article based on the review from somebody I trust to tell the truth about it.... not their marketing machine (which I've never trusted and has always annoyed me)... if they keep going this way they won't have any users left... incidently I had no intention of ordering it before the review.
*high fives El Reg* sticking it to man five!
Free promotion
Well this is the place I came to to decide if I was going to buy Snow leopard or not.
Then Apple decide they can't have the free promotion just days before the launch?
Never thought I would say this, but Apple have been a bunch of idiots.
As everyone else is going to say on here we support you El Reg for your excellent articles (And bizzare sense of humor)
Keep it up!
go get them tiger, ehm, leopard
well, well, if that's not a bitter bite for the apple...
I still wonder what's the exact difference between a patent and a trade secret... because Steve himself has plenty of the former to his name (and they only last 20 years) but pleading deniability of something that is well known and announced looks fairly comical to me...
haven't Snow Leopard features be known for a while already and hasn't Apple itself publicised them? how exactly is that talking about these features is not allowed because they are a trade secret? then Apple should not even run commercials of anything they are not already selling...
(and the latter suggestions is for everybody really...)
what you should offer.......
Is to never cover anything related to Apple or its affiliates ever again.
That said your OS X hack article the other day was excellent and should be more likely to incur the jobsian wrath than advertising the latest release of sleet donkey 10.6.whatever.
How about some articles reviewing apple hardware with a Linux OS running on it? That should lead to some venting of the spleen (and possibly the liver as well ) from the fruitigonistic brigade.
Paris - brighter than sue, grabbit and run llp
HOLY CRAP ASHLEE VANCE IS MALE
Well, there goes the shrine.
If this annoyed them ....
Just imagine how riled the 'how to run OSX on your vanilla PC hardware' article got em...
/chuckles
The lawyers have got it right, actually
If I worked at that law firm for apple, I'd send that letter too. Who cares if it's right or wrong, send it anyway, send a bill to apple, get paid lots and have a laugh doing it.
And I'd now be relishing taking el reg to court over this. Just think how many hours I could bill! I'd make a fortune!
Screw this, I'm leaving IT to become a lawyer!
@SmallYellowFuzzyDuck
El Reg does NOT have a bizzare sense of humour. It's perfectly normal.
/Brit
Never a truer word...
“If the Church of Scientology went into consumer electronics it would be Apple" - Dan Lyons.
(How to piss them both off in one sentence; is that the sound of black helicopters full of lawyers I can hear...?)
A takedown notice ...
.. as in the DCMC is bound by US law ONLY!
So tell them to fuck off and go to hell.
Bunch of Eejits
I too am a Mac user, and found the article very useful, written in a non-partisan way.
Why Apple continues to shoot itself in the foot with such actions defies logic.
I will stick with the product, and probably upgrade at version 10.6.5 but not before. I am not a Mac Fanboy, I use the product because it makes business sense, and going for V10.x.1 is not sensible. There are always too many bugs, fixes/work-arounds. Also, the fact that I'd have to upgrade to Adobe CS4 makes it a very expensive move.
Apple's threats against El Reg alienate a Mac user of some 22 years.
Isn't this standard procedure?
If they don't send out the legal notices then they risk losing the right to defend their IP in the future. This is standard operating procedure for most businesses.
Page 5...
...Is the page about the "hidden gem" that is Automator.
Perhaps Apple wants it to stay hidden? :)
A more favourable review than the beloved Mossbergs, but . .
Whether you think it's silly or not, Apple does have the legal right to issue information under NDA and try to manage the timing of reviews of new products. They don't want the Register to get in the habit. Pretty soon hundreds of sites would join in for future product releases. So they have to act, even though it seems trivial. To claim the information was in the public domain is to claim that Orlowski invented the review based on reading blogs etc, without relying on materials under NDA. We all know that's nonsense. Not much chance of Orlowski or the Reg ever being included in Apple's very short list of reviewers, but the Reg published a day too early to avoid the ire of Apple.
I appreciate the stance of the Reg...
Your position in this case - along with the quality of most of your output and much of the user comment - makes El Reg a primary tech news source for me.
Maybe you will miss out on some page views through not having access to some PR tosh from certain vendors (often apparently regurgitated without edits by other "news" sites) - but I know that the substantive and important stories will be covered here.
Well done & keep it up.
Good old Apple
Nice of Apple to snatch PR defeat from the jaws of victory. Will they never learn??
have you read the terms El-Reg?
it's all fine to try to get some of your reader's sympathy ElReg but you should have read the confidentiality agreement before posting snap shots that shouldn't have been posted.
Whilst installing the beta release you've agreed to the term and conditions. (remember that "I agree" button ? so why are you whining now ?
Arkell v. Pressdram
"Pressdram" is the name of the company which published Private Eye. No need to say more.
I suspect that a bunch of Lawyers in California are are pushing their luck, but perhaps they have to do something to notify everyone so as to make their claims stick against the people they can drag into court.
Apparently, one should insert a title
I would have thought Apple's lawyers would be Dewey Fleeceham and Howe. The name fits.
The one with the iPhone in the pocket please...
@BenDwire
Yeah, El Reg has a perfectly normal bizarre sense of humour.
/Fellow Brit.
Snow Leopard?
I heard an interview of Jobs the other day, and I had trouble understanding why Apple would name an OS "Slow Leper"*. I get it now...
*Why not Vista2?
Memory
If my memory serves me correctly, El Reg was once hit with a DCMA as well as the host, or maybe it was just the host, which resulted in El Reg going down, after that situation El Reg changed providers so the same thing couldn't happen again, it's nice to see that prior planning allowed me to read this article today!
@Colinmac
True dat. I'll be honest, when I started reading this article I assumed it was about the OSX install dongle!
I'd love to know...
...exactly which one of El Reg's writers actually shit through Apple's letterbox that one time.
@get a grip...
Couldnt agree more & well done El Reg,
Tell em to fuck off anyway, even though I like & use Macs, i dont like this sort of trivia
Software company lawers are too full of themselves where this sort of suff is concerned.
Apple wasting shareholder assets?
Perhaps a shareholder should file suit against Apple's management about the manner in which they waste shareholder assets (cash) by engaging O'M/M for this frivolous matter.
They may have meant
that the release candidate versions (as reviewed) of their latest operating systems are subject to NDAs. Either way they are a bunch of cocks.
On the other hand...
Some folks are just plain old upset that holding back their print runs gets nowhere because some organisaion prints before an already agreed publication date.
"If they can do it why can't I?" you might hear from other publishers.
Hosting in the US?
Swtich to an Non-US based host and say good bye to DCMA
oh dear!
Will Apple unleash their army of annoying coloured shirted shop assistants to assault Vulture central if EL Reg does not comply to their whims?
Ingenious free publicity!
Apple makes really nice GUI/UI stuff. Plus, cool (albeit hermetically sealed) hardware.
But Apple especially excels in publicity mongering.
Using a spurious DMCA take-down notice to warrant another news item?
Ingenious.
@sleepy
"without relying on materials under NDA"
as they said in the article, they never signed an NDA
it's just you
for some reason, not only did these guys <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/technology/personaltech/27pogue.html?_r=1&ref=personaltech> and <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2352065,00.asp> _not_ get a take-down notice, _they got a mention on Apple's RSS feed_ <feed://www.apple.com/main/rss/hotnews/hotnews.rss>.
They really, really, REALLY don't like you guys.
Whatever did you do to earn the Jobsian ire?
You assume it had anything to do with Apple.
Chris 19 above almost certainly has it right. It is very doubtful that Apple are even dimmly aware that el Reg did the review. The lawyers will be searching the web for any possible technical breaches, and billing Apple for the effort of writing the letters. It is a great business. Lawyers essentially making work for themselves. At $500 an hour at least. We are indeed in the wrong business.
This is NOT a title
For all the complaining people do about the behaiviour of aPPLE you still buy there crap.. So why should they listen to your complaints?
@ By Law
I'm another one who placed an order after reading the article. What a wunch of bankers!
Re: If this annoyed them ....
We were secretly hoping they'd send us another one for that. Two days in a row would have been cool...
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