Juggling Chainsaws: How Amanda Gorton fought Apple & the DMCA while building Corellium

Your fledgling startup has just been sued by one of the most powerful companies in the world.
How do you defend yourself?
And keep your company afloat?

This was the challenge faced by Amanda Gorton, CEO of Corellium, a company whose virtualization platform enables efficient mobile security research and quality testing across a massive variety of devices. Sued by Apple for both copyright infringement and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Amanda was thrust into an exhausting balancing act of defending and running her young business at the same time. In this episode of Security Voices, she shares the details of how she survived and successfully defended her company.

Dave and Amanda go beyond the lawsuit and into the tricky territory of companies like Corellium who provide a service whose sales process must be governed by a clear sense of ethics to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. She shares the real world challenges of developing and applying such a policy in a company and while it may be uncomfortable to trust a small company with such a weighty responsibility, they just might be the very best option we have.

We explore the complicated nature of DMCA in a world that has changed dramatically since its anti-Napster driven inception back in the late 90s. From the NSA’s release of Ghidra to Web3, we muse on the future of the DMCA whose relevance feels to be slipping into the history books.

Bio
Amanda Gorton is co-founder and CEO of Corellium, which provides an Arm-native cloud platform that virtualizes mobile and IoT devices across iOS, Android, and Linux. Corellium enables never-before-possible security research, development, and quality testing of apps, firmware, and hardware on Arm. Previously, Gorton co-founded and was the CEO of security startup Virtual, which was acquired by Citrix in 2014. She earned a degree in classics from Yale University.