To most consumers, Apple's App Store may seem like sunshine and rainbows. But to a developer, getting an application on it presents a number of legal challenges.
No, it's not Apple's historically notorious approval process. Instead, as attorney and Joystiq contributor Mark Methenitis explained to a group of developers during a talk at the Game Developer's Conference here Wednesday, it's the contracts developers have to sign that can get them into some serious trouble if they're not careful.
Apple's contracts, which include the iPhone developer program license agreement, the registered iPhone developer agreement, and the iPhone SDK agreement, aren't "outside the realm of being reasonable," Methenitis said. But there are some common pitfalls developers need to watch out for when crafting their apps.
One of those is confidentiality. It's been well known that developers can't talk about pre-release builds of things like iTunes, the iPhone OS, and the iPhone SDK (except to each other), but that same confidentiality stretches out to cover an entire device, too--not just an app that takes advantage of undocumented features. This means a developer who has a test version of the new OS can't even let a non-developer friend use that phone to make a phone call since it would be a breach of that contract. Can Apple really make sure that doesn't happen? No, but if that person who used the phone blabs, and it can be traced back to that developer, there's nothing to protect the developer in a legal suit.
Source : http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20000255-248.html
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