Ondrej Holzman Before the court in Oakland, USA, it is being decided whether the changes in iTunes that Apple made in the last decade were primarily intended for the Californian company to meet its obligations to the record companies, or mainly to try to destroy the competition. Steve Jobs, the late co-founder and former CEO of Apple, also had something to say about it through a recorded statement from 2011.
The fact that Apple had to respond to a competitive solution mainly because of the record companies is where the apple company's lawyers base a large part of their defense. Apple had very strict contracts with record companies that it could not afford to lose, former iTunes boss Eddy Cue and now Steve Jobs said in previously unreleased recordings.
However, the plaintiffs see Apple's actions in iTunes 7.0 and 7.4 primarily as an attempt to prevent competitors such as Real Networks and Navio Systems from entering the market at all. The iPod manufacturer should also have disadvantaged the users it locked in its own system. Eddy Cue, who was in charge of iTunes as it is today, already stated that Apple practically had no choice, and now Steve Jobs also confirmed his words in front of the jury:
If I remember correctly, from my point of view - and from Apple's point of view - we were the only big company in the industry at the time that didn't have deep pockets. We had clear contracts with the record companies when people would break the DRM protection system in iTunes or on the iPod, which would, for example, allow you to download music from an iPod and put it on someone else's computer. That would be a clear violation of licenses with recording studios who could stop supplying us with music at any time. I remember we were very concerned about it. It took us a lot of effort to make sure people couldn't hack our DRM protection system, because if they could, we'd get nasty emails from record companies threatening to terminate our contracts.
Like Eddy Cue before him, Steve Jobs testified, in other words, that Apple had no choice but to adhere to strict safeguards in contracts with record companies, because in the early days the Californian firm did not have a strong market position and could not afford even a single partner to come.
Jobs also confirmed that there were not a few cases of breaking into Apple's protection system, i.e. iTunes and iPods. "There are a lot of hackers trying to break into our systems to do things that would violate the contracts we had with the record companies, and we were very afraid of that," Steve Jobs confirmed the reality of those days and also the reason why Apple did not play music from other stores on its devices. "We've had to constantly step up protection in iTunes and iPod," Jobs said, noting that security in those products has become a "moving target."
According to Jobs, denying competing solutions access to his products was a "side effect" of the whole effort, however, he added that Apple did not want to take responsibility and try to work with third parties to try to fit them into its very closed system that it had developed. This is exactly what the plaintiffs see as the problem, namely that the new versions of iTunes did not bring any beneficial news for users, but only hindered competition.
According to the lawsuit, the changes in the DRM protection system were intended to harm primarily those users who would like to drag their music libraries to other devices. However, Apple did not allow them to do so, and thanks to this, it maintained its dominance in the market and dictated higher prices. Apple argues against this that other companies have also tried to implement a similarly closed system, although they have not succeeded, such as Microsoft with its Zune player.
The trial will continue next week. Apple lawyers however they found a major problem for the lawsuit, which represents roughly 8 million users, as it turns out that the two plaintiffs named in the documents may not have purchased their iPods at all during the time period before the court. However, the plaintiffs have already responded and want to add a new person to represent the plaintiff. Everything should be resolved within the next week.
