Legal Security: OCP and Apple's Intel Macs

John Robinson continues to expand his discussions on the runtime layer underlying our new desktop software architecture, the OCP. His post is here, with some background discussion here.

There's some novel concepts around services and process groups John covers, and a few unique details he skims over without real comment, but I wanted to point out one specific, um... interesting thing he mentions only in passing - the OCP Haiku that you (developer-"you", not end-user-"you") must submit (in code) before you can activate and consume services:

Writing Code
The Dawn Sun Breaks
I am at Peace
- The OCP “Haiku”© AOL 2003-2006

Almost exactly like the poem that Apple embedded in the software/hardware interface of OS X for their Intel Macs, this isn't a cute wink to hackers or a nudge to anyone's conscience: its actually a platform "security" feature. The idea is not to prevent hackers, per se, but to try and cloak one's technology with as many legal protections as possible to prevent "white hats" from absconding with your IP without recourse. In the OCP design, we attempt to engender the protection of patent, contract, DMCA and copyright law - our Haiku being about the latter two, in particular, of course.

An original poem is the smallest legal copyrightable work - or I should, a poem is a copyrightable work, of which a Haiku is the shortest legally recognized form (or so I'm told). Incidentally, John was the author of our OCP Haiku - we held an internal contest amongst our client developers, and his was selected as most poetic.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out for Apple - as far as I know, these types of protections have been in the theoretical category (legally speaking), though they've been extended and applied in the real world in a number of novel ways (including ours) for a few years now.