• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 28, 2009

A four-month old dispute between Apple and the site BluWiki.com landed in court Monday when the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the iPod manufacturer.

The organization is asking a court to declare that posts on OdioWorks' BluWiki.com about reverse engineering iPods so they will work with management software other than iTunes -- such as Songbird -- are lawful.

The dispute dates back to last November, when discussions about reverse engineering Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone surfaced on BluWiki.com.

Apple demanded that BluWiki take down the posts on the grounds that they infringed its copyright and violated the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

At the time, the discussions were preliminary and the commenters had not succeeded in achieving interoperability. BluWiki removed the posts under protest.

The site now argues that Apple's interpretation of the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions violates users' free speech rights. "OdioWorks takes the First Amendment rights of BluWiki users seriously, believes that Apple's legal claims are baseless, and would like to restore the (posts)," states the lawsuit, filed in federal district court in the northern district of California.

When the disputed posts initially went live, they did not appear to contain information relating to FairPlay's digital rights management software, which restricts people's ability to transfer copyrighted tracks. For that reason, it wasn't immediately apparent how posts potentially violated the DMCA, which makes it unlawful to traffic in tools that defeat copyright restrictions.

But late last year, Apple said that some of the code that was being discussed on BluWiki actually was used in conjunction with FairPlay.

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann says that even if some of the code related to FairPlay, the BluWiki users still had a free speech right to discuss the software.

He said that the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that merely discussing digital rights management software doesn't violate the DMCA. Regardless, he said, the commenters didn't aim to get around copyright restrictions on music, but to use non-Apple management software. "They were not interested in reverse engineering FairPlay. They were interested in getting their iPods to work with software other than iTunes," he said.