Ajax Girl

Apple has a history of using lawyers against bloggers. There was the now infamous Think Secret lawsuit, which may have had merit. But they also engage in clearly superfluous, bullying tactics as well. In August we received a letter from Apple’s lawyers demanding that we remove an embedded YouTube video showing features from OSX 10.5. We felt this was an extreme position to take - Apple could have simply requested YouTube to remove the video. And this wasn’t a trade secrets issue - they also had a very similar video up on their own website.

Today Apple is engaging in similar tactics against a number of bloggers who simply reported on the fact that someone created a skin for Windows Mobile phones that looks exactly like the new iPhone user interface. See the images above - the Windows version is on the left, Apple’s version is on the right.

The offending download page is here (the software has now been removed). Blogger Paul O’Brien simply linked to this download page and included a screenshot of the user interface and also received a cease & desist letter from Apple’s lawyers.

I think this is all complete nonsense. If Apple wants to go after the guy that made the Windows Mobile skin that looks like the iPhone, fine. But to bully bloggers who are simply reporting on this is another matter.

More on this story at TechMeme. As far as I can tell, the software is no longer available anywhere for download. If that is incorrect, please let us know.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/75059276/

Jason Calacanis, the former CEO of Engadget’s parent company, Weblogs, Inc., told me earlier today that the site had 10 million page views on Tuesday when they covered the iPhone announcement - ten times their normal traffic of a million or so page views per day.

Engadget, the top ranked blog on Technorati, can no longer really be put in the same pack as other big blogs. Putting this into perspective, that’s about three months worth of traffic for TechCrunch in one day on Engadget, and we’re no. 4 on the Technorati list. And it is more than 5x the traffic that Gizmodo, the second largest gadget blog, saw that day (reinforcing the 80/20 rule). Our own gadget blog, CrunchGear, had a record day in traffic as well, albeit on a much smaller scale.

With massive numbers of readers flocking to blogs when big news is announced, it’s hard to say that mainstream audiences aren’t paying attention. Just about everyone that cares knew exactly what was being announced at MacWorld just moments after it was said, and they got the news from Engadget or another blog. Pictures and video were available real time as well. By the time television and newspapers got to the story, the really interested readers were already on to the next thing.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/74793875/