According to court papers filed on Psystar's behalf:

Apple is prohibited from bringing action against Psystar for the alleged infringement of one or more of the plaintiff's copyrights for failure to register said copyrights with the copyright office as required.

Not possessing having registered a copyright for the OS would make it kind of hard to enforce one, and would undermine Apple's entire suit suit.

I'm no lawyer, so I'll leave the copyright discussion to someone who knows better. But you really can't ignore the timing and circumstances of this development. Following a few notable failures in court, Psystar appears to be losing their fight against Apple, at least as long as it's framed as a copyright issue. Changing the terms, it seems, is their only option, and reeks of desperation. Not to mention the fact that it was utterly predictable. In our last Psystar update, posted before any of this happened, commenter Tim Faulkner said:

What people are ignoring is that Apple's already won. Even if Psystar can argue they have a legal right to hack Mac OS, they can't demonstrate that they have any right to distribute Apple's copyright without Apple's consent unless the antitrust claims (which they've abandoned) had merit. Even if Psystar has a right to circumvent Apple's weak protection (highly questionable), how are they going to prove they have a right to distribute Mac OS? They can't, that's impossible.

To which redwingsmonk added:

I think the only way psystar could win this if they claim OSX was open source and they have free reign to modify the code and resell it.

And here we are. It looks like Psystar—who is now apparently taking legal advice from anonymous Gizmodo commenters—knew that challenging Apple's copyright was pretty much their only hope. A faint hope, it's safe to say. [InformationWeek via AppleInsider]

All three of the above companies have been hit with lawsuits dealing with the issue, and lawyers who tackle it are making a decent buck off of it. One the one hand, the companies claim that people aren't working while their computers boot, instead chatting with coworkers or having a coffee. On the other hand, if you have to be in a cubicle, you're working, and it's not the employees fault that their crap computers take so long to get revved up.

But hey, this is America, so we'll leave it for the courts to decide. [TaxProf Blog via The Inquirer]

News of this product has reached the ears of the suits black turtlenecks in Cupertino and apparently they are not happy. More, plus a picture of the iGasm unboxed (and unPantsed, you'll be pleased to hear) after the jump.

Jacqueline Gold, boss of the sex toy company, received a legal letter from Apple (let's face it, the symbol of original sin) asking it to cease and desist with its promotional posters, a juicy rip-off of the iPod silhouette campaign—only this time, instead of the white wires going into her pocket, they are disappearing into her scanties.

Ms Gold's only response has been humorous. "Perhaps I can send them an iGasm to put the smile back on their faces." Er, I don't think it will work on Steve, as I think he is lacking the correct—how shall we say this?—plumbing. – Ad Dugdale

Apple Moans over Sex Toy Spat [The Register]

Vincent of Slashgear registered and set up motorazr.com as a Motorola RAZR community site back in July of '04, a full 11 months before Motorola filed the trademark for "motorazr". Everything was fine until August of '06, when Moto's lawyers decided they wanted the domain, and even offered a piddling amount of $1,500 to get him to go away. When that didn't work, their lawyer was "rude and unprofessional", and now Motorola's going through arbitration with the World Intellectual Property Organization to get the domain.

What are your thoughts? – Jason Chen

Motorola resorts to reverse domain hijacking of motorazr.com [Vincent Nguyen]

Of course the real problem isn't the single excerpted page being linked from Something Awful, but instead the fact that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load. (A temperature so high that the processor is at risk of malfunctioning.) Rather than addressing the problem of the shoddy workmanship, documented not only by those who purchased Apple's $2,500 laptop but by Apple's own service manual, Apple is trying to silence those from the Macintosh community who are trying to help other Mac users fix Apple's mistake.

My MacBook Pro has the problem with the whining screen, too. Perhaps I'll wait until they acknowledge the sloppy application of the thermal grease before I go in to request repair. In the meantime I will keep telling people how much I love using my Mac while silently questioning my devotion to a company who would rather use the law than service to assuage their customers' complaints.