14 DAY TRIAL // What happened to the good old days (to be more exact, the few tens of minutes during which Steve Jobs presented the device) when the iPhone was a �revolutionary communication device� with no kind of fears of being taken down? Nowadays, it seems that everybody out there wants a piece of its pie, be it LG with their Prada cellphone, Samsung with the F700, Meizu with its clone or whomever you might think of.
The safety net Apple tried to place under the iPhone with the help of its lawyer team is still at work but, I don't know why, that thing doesn't seem to work when the trouble is about one of the guys that can actually fight their lawyers in court.
Does anyone out there know the reason why Apple didn't sue the heck out of the Meizu company when they unveiled their iPhone clone, the miniOne, for everyone to see? I don't, but there's something very fishy about the whole deal.
Apple seems to take the place of Microsoft, hunting down all the little guys with not enough financial power to fight with them. When saying that, I'm talking about the bloggers and the small websites that published the skin or the screenshot of a smartphone running an iPhone skin just a few days after the Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld.
Apple went crazy and sent all of them letters that asked the removal of the said skin if they didn't want to get sued for all they got. The people did as they were told but, ironically, although the Cupertino based company tried its best in stopping the skin to take grounds on the Internet, it just was the thing that led to its availability all across the web.
About a week ago, a programmer has published a video of its E-TEN Pocket PC featuring an iPhone look-a-like interface he designed. The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this video demonstration was that the poor guy will surely get its a** dragged around from court to court but it seems I was, somewhat, wrong about it. They didn't sue him, yet, but they did manage to suspend its website account for a couple of days and to remove its demonstration from YouTube's listings due to copyright infringement.
I'm not saying they weren't right to do that, they do have the right to protect their registered property (an example: the icons the guy used are the exact ones you can see in the demonstration Jobs made during the iPhone presentation).
But, think about this for a moment. He was just showing a proof of concept which he wasn't trying to sell or distribute. He was only demonstrating the things you can do with an E-TEN M600 Pocket PC (if you have the required programming skills that is). The only mistake he did was to copy iPhone's interface and regarding this aspect of the deal, I totally agree with Apple's decision.
If he would have taken the other road, the legal one, against which Apple couldn't have objected in any way, we would have seen a totally different ending. If he would have designed its own interface and would have made a video demonstration of it placing it on YouTube, I'm pretty sure things could have been a lot different (maybe some software company would have got interested and decided to buy its iPhone-like working Pocket PC software?).
If you are curious how things were like for the programmer that made that video demonstration, let's hear it from its own mouth:
�For a few days before Chinese New Year, I've actually been quite busy developing my very own iPhone interface for the PocketPC. After looking at the functions and interface on the iPhone, I was keen on bringing it over to my Eten M600 PPC. The iPhone interface was practical, looked neat and it was way cooler than any wm5 theme....Although this looks like an iPhone, it will never be an iPhone. But until it is released in July this year, all we can do is to try and imitate.[...] Finally Apple stepped in and ordered Youtube to remove my video. I thought I would get an email from them but I don't think they will bother anymore after this. So yea, it has been a very strange 3 days, with 2 suspensions of my site account due to over usage and some people wanting to get me sued so badly.�
What do you think? He didn't have a jolly time from what I can see :). If you haven't seen the video Apple has removed, you can watch this re-uploaded edition of the same movie (as long as it will last on YouTube's servers):