Apple using the DMCA to stop early sales of iOS 6.
The infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown process gets quite a bit of press when content owners such as movie studios and record companies use it to take infringing copies of films or music offline. The safe harbor provisions of the DMCA are at the heart of content-distribution platforms’ defenses against infringement occasioned by users of the platform. (Think Viacom v. YouTube.)
Apple reminds us, however, that the DMCA gives all copyright owners — not just those who own copyrights in content — a mechanism for getting infringing works off the internet. According to this piece on Engadget, Apple has been contacting hosting providers of sites that offer unauthorized copies of the forthcoming iOS 6 for sale.
So the DMCA, acting in the name of copyright protection, provides a remedy for software providers to keep the clamps on parties who may have access to software for their own use (in this case, iOS developers) but go outside the bounds of such use and offer the technology for sale to others.