Psystar Files Anti-trust Suit Against Apple

It’s been a while since we heard anything from Psystar or Apple regarding the impending copyright infringement suit the latter filed against the Mac clone company a couple of months back. Today it emerged that Florida-based Psystar will counter sue and has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple.

The company has been making noise about a countersuit for months now. As soon as Psystar started selling the computers (back in April), people were speculating as to how long it would take Apple to take notice and file a lawsuit to put an end to the whole nasty business. When Psystar got wind of the rumors about Apple suits, the company vowed to challenge Apple’s EULA. In an interview with InformationWeek, a Psystar employee named Robert was quoted as saying, “"What if Honda said that, after you buy their car, you could only drive it on the roads they said you could ?" and it seems the company is sticking to its story that Apple’s EULA is warrants an anti-trust suit.

Psystar president, Rudy Pedraza told us back in April that the company was just trying to help Steve Jobs because he didn’t make enough money. According to CNET, Pedraza said in a press conference Tuesday that Psystar was trying to make Leopard "more accessible" by offering it on less expensive hardware than Apple.

According to CNET, Psystar’s attorneys called Apple’s copyright infringement accusations "misinformed and mischaracterized." The company claims that what is installed or shipped with the PCs they tout is a fully licensed and unmodified copy of Apple’s software and that the company has just "leveraged open source-licensed code including Apple’s OS" to enable users to run Leopard on a machine that isn’t a Mac.

Last time we contacted Psystar for comment we were told there was no one (PR or otherwise) that could comment on the Apple suit and that we would have to email press@psystar.com. We were told the same this time around and when we pointed out that we were still waiting for a reply to an email we sent mid-July, we were told the only way to get a press comment was to send an email because, “there’s no one here qualified to talk about it”. We asked if a supervisor could put us through to someone who was qualified and again he told us, the only way to get a comment would be to email press@psystar.com. Here goes nothing.