Back in January, we noted that despite Steve Jobs's posturing on the music DRM front, Apple remains a big supporter and user of DRM and DRM-like schemes throughout their product lines. Over at the EFF blog, Fred von Lohmann suggests another potential example. The new iPod Shuffle has no buttons; the controls are on the included headphones. And if these folks are right (and there seem to be some doubts), the new shuffles won't work with the remote controls of any existing third-party headphones because the iPod looks for a special "authentication chip" that so far is only embedded in the headphones Apple bundles with the shuffle. This would be irritating to me personally because I hate earbuds and so if I bought a shuffle the first thing I'd want to do is swap out the Apple-supplied earbuds with third-party headphones.

Fred suggests that the purpose of this "authentication chip" is to trigger liability under the DMCA if anyone tries to reverse-engineer the chip. That's possible, but it's far from clear that that's what's going on. We don't know exactly what the chip does, but it seems unlikely that they'd embed enough computing power in the chip to do real crypto. And if there's no crypto, it becomes harder—although certainly not impossible—to invoke the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. Unfortunately, there's so little case law on the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules that we don't really know how it would apply in a case like this. And that uncertainty may be all Apple needs to discourage third parties from building unauthorized accessories.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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