Apple Confuses Speech with a DMCA Violation
Apple’s lawyers also appear to have overlooked the DMCA’s reverse engineering exception, 17 U.S.C. 1201(f), which permits individuals to circumvent technological measures and distribute circumvention tools "for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute [copyright] infringement."Enabling iPods to interoperate with “independently created computer programs” (like gtkpod, Winamp, and Songbird) is precisely what the reverse engineering exception was intended to protect.