On November 13, a San Francisco Federal Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Apple Inc., in a copyrights violation lawsuit which the company had slapped against Psystar Corp., Macintosh clone maker. The latter has been charged with both violating Apple's copyrights as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The ruling has come as a death row for the charged company.

According to the ruling, Psystar had infringed Apple's "exclusive right" to come up with "derivative works of Mac OS X", and original files had been replaced with unauthorized software. Shunning Psystar's claim that the company was protected by the First Sale Doctrine, which entitles that buyer of a copyrighted work "right to resell it without the permission of, or any payment to, the copyright holder", the court charged the company with making three major unlawful modification's to Apple's OS - replacing original boot loader, removal of Apple kernel extension files and addition of non-Apple kernel extensions.

"Psystar contends that this did not amount to creating a derivative work, because Apple's source code, object code, or kernel extensions were not modified. This argument is unavailing. Psystar admittedly replaced entire files within the software while copying other portions", shared Judge Alsup.

Currently, there are 6 Psystar Mac clones in the market, starting at $600 and they will soon be pulled out. A hearing for remedies has been scheduled by the court for December 14.