There is no ”parallel” to draw here. The fact of the matter is that Beeper reverse engineered a proprietary protocol and then charged money for a solution offering a feature that’s typically exclusive to Apple’s hardware. The original engineer is irrelevant here as he relinquished all ownership rights to his code to Beeper as part of their sales agreement, so from the courts’ perspective Beeper is the one that did the reverse engineering (because they own the rights to that code).
Beeper and their customers may or may not be Apple users
There is no “gray area” here either. The way Beeper Mini was able to send iMessages is by fabricating the identity of a fake Apple device on Apple’s servers. Even if the device is fake, under the agreement of the EULA this is still an “Apple device” that is being used. This is the same for Beeper Mini’s subscribers who had to register their phone numbers with iMessage — the only way to do that is with an already validated Apple device. As users of Apple’s services through a validated Apple device, they fall under the terms of the EULA.
Of course, that’s if we outright ignore the problem of the Apple device being fake. Circumventing device identity verification with a forged identity is a clear violation of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act); this fact alone also makes the DMCA’s exemptions completely void.
This isn’t the case with something like Hackintosh, where its owners still purchased Apple hardware and software and thus are fully entitled to use them as they see fit. Android users purchased no Apple hardware, no Apple software, and are exploiting Apple’s servers through a fake Apple device.
There is no way you can reasonably spin “faking an Apple device’s identity” to be anything related to interoperability. The whole thing was able to work because it successfully fooled Apple into thinking it was talking to a real Apple device — like a hacker breaking into a company’s servers because they injected the right malicious code to make the servers think they had the right authorization.
The reflection in news sources…
is precisely because Beeper marketed their app and brand to give you “blue bubbles on Android.” “Blue bubbles” is a term well established in the common public to mean “iMessage.” The subscription agreement straight up states that subscribers can send iMessages from an Android device as one of the features of that subscription. The general public perceived the app as “iMessage for Android;” there is seriously no contention here to be made.
You even state in the previous paragraph that Beeper’s own tagline for their app is “iMessage on Android” and then immediately contradict yourself by saying news outlets make up random taglines, despite them pulling those words straight from Beeper themselves.
They are using iMessage to bolster their Beeper brand. That is copyright infringement.
Have they actually stolen Apple’s intellectual property?
Yes. They purchased all ownership rights to an iMessage implementation and are the proper legal owners of it. Combine that with the fact that a reverse engineered implementation of a proprietary service produces code that looks very similar to the original code, and that they keep marketing this app as bringing an Apple-exclusive feature to Android… you have yourself a crystal clear case of copyright infringement.
There is no ”parallel” to draw here. The fact of the matter is that Beeper reverse engineered a proprietary protocol and then charged money for a solution offering a feature that’s typically exclusive to Apple’s hardware. The original engineer is irrelevant here as he relinquished all ownership rights to his code to Beeper as part of their sales agreement, so from the courts’ perspective Beeper is the one that did the reverse engineering (because they own the rights to that code).
There is no “gray area” here either. The way Beeper Mini was able to send iMessages is by fabricating the identity of a fake Apple device on Apple’s servers. Even if the device is fake, under the agreement of the EULA this is still an “Apple device” that is being used. This is the same for Beeper Mini’s subscribers who had to register their phone numbers with iMessage — the only way to do that is with an already validated Apple device. As users of Apple’s services through a validated Apple device, they fall under the terms of the EULA.
Of course, that’s if we outright ignore the problem of the Apple device being fake. Circumventing device identity verification with a forged identity is a clear violation of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act); this fact alone also makes the DMCA’s exemptions completely void.
This isn’t the case with something like Hackintosh, where its owners still purchased Apple hardware and software and thus are fully entitled to use them as they see fit. Android users purchased no Apple hardware, no Apple software, and are exploiting Apple’s servers through a fake Apple device.
There is no way you can reasonably spin “faking an Apple device’s identity” to be anything related to interoperability. The whole thing was able to work because it successfully fooled Apple into thinking it was talking to a real Apple device — like a hacker breaking into a company’s servers because they injected the right malicious code to make the servers think they had the right authorization.
is precisely because Beeper marketed their app and brand to give you “blue bubbles on Android.” “Blue bubbles” is a term well established in the common public to mean “iMessage.” The subscription agreement straight up states that subscribers can send iMessages from an Android device as one of the features of that subscription. The general public perceived the app as “iMessage for Android;” there is seriously no contention here to be made.
You even state in the previous paragraph that Beeper’s own tagline for their app is “iMessage on Android” and then immediately contradict yourself by saying news outlets make up random taglines, despite them pulling those words straight from Beeper themselves.
They are using iMessage to bolster their Beeper brand. That is copyright infringement.
Yes. They purchased all ownership rights to an iMessage implementation and are the proper legal owners of it. Combine that with the fact that a reverse engineered implementation of a proprietary service produces code that looks very similar to the original code, and that they keep marketing this app as bringing an Apple-exclusive feature to Android… you have yourself a crystal clear case of copyright infringement.