Ondrej Holzman It doesn't happen very often, but the case involving iPods and iTunes, in which Apple is being sued for harming customers and competitors, has no plaintiff at this time. About eight million users are standing against the Californian giant, but the main plaintiff is missing. Judge Rogers disqualified the previous ones. But the plaintiff has a chance to come up with new names so the case can continue.
After Apple, the injured users are demanding $350 million in damages (if found guilty of violating antitrust laws, it can be tripled), but at the moment they have a major problem - there is not a single relevant name on the list of leading plaintiffs. On Monday, Judge Yvonne Rogers removed the last of them, Marianna Rosen. Even she was unable to provide evidence that she purchased her iPods between September 2006 and March 2009.
It was to this time period that the case was narrowed down before it went to the jury. Before Rosen, the judge also disqualified two other plaintiffs, who also failed to prove that they had purchased the iPods at the specified time. With the case actually having no plaintiff, he came Apple last week and the judge ruled in his favor. At the same time, however, she did not accede to Apple's proposal that the entire case be swept off the table because of this.
The plaintiffs have until Tuesday to come up with a new person who could serve as the lead plaintiff representing the roughly eight million users who actually bought iPods during that period. A lead "named plaintiff" is a requirement in class actions. Rosen can't be, because Apple has provided evidence that her iPods were either purchased at a different time than she mentioned, or had bad software.
Prosecutors get a second chance
Judge Rogers reprimanded the prosecution and indicated that she certainly did not like having to deal with such an issue when jurors had already been hearing testimony for a week. "I'm concerned," Rogers said of Rosen and her deputies that they failed to do their job and failed to secure a valid plaintiff.
Fortunately for them, however, the judge felt an obligation to the "millions of absent class members" and so gave the lawyers a second chance. The plaintiffs had until Monday night to submit a list of new lead plaintiffs to Apple for the California company's representatives to review. They should then be presented to the jury on Tuesday.
But the plaintiff should probably find a suitable candidate out of several million customers. "There are plaintiffs willing and ready to get involved and we'll have them in court tomorrow," plaintiffs' attorney Bonny Sweeney said yesterday.
The trial will most likely continue, and it will be up to a jury to decide whether Apple's iTunes and iPod updates in the past were done primarily to improve its products or systematically block competition. Apple's representatives, led by Steve Jobs (he testified before his death in 2011) and iTunes chief Eddy Cuo, claim that they were forced by the record companies to protect the music they sold, and any restriction of competition was only "side effects".
However, the plaintiffs see in Apple's actions a clear intention to prevent competition from expanding in the market, and at the same time the apple company harmed users who, for example, could not take music purchased in iTunes and transfer it to another computer and play it on another player.
You can find the complete coverage of this case <a href="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1932/8043/files/200721_ODSTOUPENI_BEZ_UDANI_DUVODU__EN.pdf?v=1595428404" data-gt-href-en="https://en.notsofunnyany.com/">here</a>.
