The operator of a public wiki site has filed a lawsuit against Apple in an attempt to defend its rights to publish information under the First Amendment. OdioWorks LLC, which runs BluWiki, filed the lawsuit in a US District Court in the northern district of California today with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in order to seek a declaratory judgment that would protect the company from continued attacks by Apple's legal team.

BluWiki, like most wiki platforms, is open to the public for the sole purposes of sharing information. The site is noncommercial and doesn't run ads, and depends on its users to edit and publish articles on a wide variety of topics. Up until about six months ago, some of those topics included information on how to use an iPod or iPhone with third-party software—something that is not possible under Apple's normal product restrictions.

In November of 2008, Apple's team of lawyers sent OdioWorks a letter demanding that the pages (referred to as the "iTunesDB Pages") be removed from BluWiki lest the company be faced with further legal action. Apple accused OdioWorks of disseminating information to circumvent Apple's DRM and enabling copyright infringement by hosting the pages on iTunesDB, which Apple believed was in violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.

OdioWorks complied with the request at that time, but says that it takes the First Amendment rights of its users very seriously. "Companies like Apple should not be able to censor online discussions by making baseless legal threats against services like BluWiki that host the discussion," OdioWorks owner Sam Odio said in a statement. "Wikis and other community sites are home to many vibrant discussions among hobbyists and tinkerers," added EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "It's legal to engage in reverse engineering in order to create a competing product, it's legal to talk about reverse engineering, and it's legal for a public wiki to host those discussions."

As a result, OdioWorks is asking for a declaratory judgment saying that hosting the information about iTunesDB on BluWiki does not violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and that it does not constitute copyright infringement. According to the complaint, OdioWorks argues that the code posted on the iTunesDB pages is protected by fair use, as well as by the de minimis doctrine of US Copyright Law (a principle used to argue that something is so trivial that it's not even worthy of judicial scrutiny).

OdioWorks is taking this case a step further than most companies often do. Instead of merely arguing that the DMCA's Safe Harbor provisions protect OdioWorks from being held responsible for content posted by users, OdioWorks and the EFF are pushing for a ruling stating that even the users have the right to post such information on the basis of free speech. In the same way that hosting information on how to make a firecracker does not make one a terrorist, OdioWorks believes that hosting information on enabling third-party software to work with Apple's devices does not make one a hacker or pirate.

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