EFF Knocks Apple for Dumping on Devs

The first rule of Apple's App Club is: You do not talk about App Club. Any developer who writes an app for the App Store is forbidden from making any public statements about the iPhone Developer Program Licensing Agreement.

Second rule of App Club is: Said developers also can't sell their apps to other app stores, even if that app is eventually rejected by Apple. Third rule of App Club: You can't reverse engineer anything having to do with the App Store software development kit (SDK) or the iPhone OS.

Fourth rule: Apple retains the right to remove your app from the App Store at any time, for any reason. (Hello, Hottest Girls app; goodbye, Hottest Girls app.) Fifth rule: If you're sued because of your app, or if Apple screws up the app to the point where you lose money and/or customers, Steve Jobs' company is liable for only a whopping US$50 in damages -- an Apple self-insurance deductible, as it were.

With Jobs playing the role of Tyler Durden, these are the rules that application developers have had to live by if they want a shot at the largest, most successful smartphone app store out there, and by extension the audience of 40 million iPhone users. The contract details have been some of the closest-held secrets in Silicon Valley -- until this week, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation, using a Freedom of Information Act request on taxpayer-funded NASA (hello, NASA iPhone App), got the agency to give up its first copy, and then the latest version of the Licensing Agreement. EFF then posted it to its Web site, along with a stinging Deeplinks blog post from senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann, who posits a dark scenario of Apple mobile domination that could include the forthcoming iPad.