A California judge Tuesday preliminarily dismissed Psystar’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple. Judge William Alsup rejected the Mac clone-maker’s counterclaim, writing Apple’s computers and Mac OS X software “are not wholly lacking in competition.”
Alsup gave Psystar until Dec. 8 to amend its countersuit to bolster its argument that Apple was preventing third parties from selling computers based on its Mac OS X operating system.
In a 19-page opinion siding with Apple’s motion to dismiss Pystar’s August countersuit, the judge ruled that Pystar’s legal team failed to support the “counterintuitive claim that Apple’s operating system is so unique that it suffers no actual or potential competitors,” according to AppleInsider, which first reported the decision.
In August, Psystar filed the countersuit following Apple’s July lawsuit alleging the Florida company infringed its copyrights and patents by selling computers with a modified version of the Mac OS capable of running on PCs.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
