Tuesday brought with it news that Apple was facing a patent infringement lawsuit concerning the iPhone. I'm not sure how successful those lawsuits will be -- I haven't looked at the filings. But apparently Apple's attorneys have also been busy doing other things, like taking down an open source project focused on making Apple's tech work with Linux.

On Nov. 10, O'Melveny & Myers attorney Ian Ramage sent a Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown notice to Sam Odio, who founded Bluwiki, which hosts the Ipodhash open source project. According to the takedown notice, Apple sees Ipodhash as technology designed to circumvent Apple's digital rights management system. Odio has complied with the notice, but notes that the developers are researching the issue to determine their rights.

As the PCWorld.com story linked above indicates, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is none to happy with Apple's actions. EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann says Apple is using the DMCA to curtail free speech:

Although it doesn't appear that the [Ipodhash] authors had yet figured out the new iTunesDB hashing mechanism, Apple's lawyers nevertheless sent a nastygram to the wiki administrator.... Apple is essentially saying here that people can't even talk about the mechanisms that Apple uses to lock in its music to the iTunes software.