Thursday, December 25, 2008

iPodhash Moves to Wikileaks Following DMCA Notice

Via arstechnica.com -

When you think of Wikileaks, things like government secrets and Sarah Palin's private e-mail come to mind. However, there's a decent amount of technology-related information on the site as well. The fact that it's nearly impossible to get content removed from Wikileaks could lead to its use as a haven for controversial technology projects, too. It turns out that the code related to the iPodhash project was posted to Wikileaks shortly after the project's BluWiki page was taken down in response to a legal notice from Apple's lawyers.

The project received a DMCA anticircumvention notice in the middle of November, and operator of BluWiki removed the content that Apple didn't like until the legal notice could be scrutinized.

Since then, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has agreed to represent iPodhash, and the project's owner has come forward with a few comments, but the original project information is still unavailable, as the various legal machinations continue. Just a few days after the takedown notice was received, however, the code generated by iPodhash thus far was posted to Wikileaks, once again making the information publicly available.

Because of the anonymous, distributed nature of Wikileaks, Apple's DMCA notice no longer carries quite as much weight to those hosting the code. Although there aren't a huge number of controversial OS X applications, I'm sure other controversial projects will turn to the site in the future, so a little project like iPodhash may end up as an example of how contentious code can be made to live on.

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