Out of Cheese

Scott Rosenberg gets the story wrong regarding Apple’s use of the DMCA to prevent the fine folks at Other World Computing from providing some software for third-party DVD drives on the Mac. The issue as I understand it is that OWC was patching Apple’s iDVD application, which would fall under the copyright protection portions of the DMCA.

Whether Apple was right to do this is another matter entirely, but the portion of the law that allows them to do so has nothing explicit to do with copying movies, and it is definitely allowing Apple to protect its intellectual property. The DMCA could not be used to prevent OWC from producing its own movie-making software that worked with third-party DVD drives, for example, but it can allow Apple to prevent OWC from modifying Apple’s software.