Ondrej Holzman The original lawsuit was filed back in 2005, but only now is the entire case, where Apple is accused of violating antitrust laws due to restrictions on the use of music purchased from the iTunes Store, coming to court. Another important lawsuit starts on Tuesday in Oakland, and one of the main roles will be played by the late Steve Jobs.
We are already in more detail about the case in which Apple will face a 350 million lawsuit informed. The class-action lawsuit involves older iPods that could only play songs sold in the iTunes Store or downloaded from purchased CDs, not music from competing stores. This, according to Apple's prosecutors, was a violation of antitrust law because it locked users into its system, who could then, for example, buy other, cheaper players.
Although Apple abandoned the so-called DRM (digital rights management) system a long time ago and now the music in the iTunes Store is unlocked for everyone, Apple ultimately failed to prevent the nearly ten-year-old lawsuit from Thomas Slattery from going to court. The entire case has gradually grown and is now composed of several lawsuits and contains over 900 documents submitted to the court by both sides of the dispute.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs now promise to argue before the court the actions of Steve Jobs, namely his e-mails, which he sent to colleagues during his tenure as CEO, and which may now negatively affect the California company. It is certainly not the first time, the current case is already the third significant antitrust case in which Apple is involved, and Steve Jobs played a role in each of them, even after his death, or rather his published communications.
Emails and a taped deposition by Jobs portray the company co-founder as having planned to destroy a competing product to protect Apple's digital music strategy. "We will show evidence that Apple acted to stop competition and because of that harmed competition and harmed customers," he told pro NYT Bonny Sweeney, Lead Counsel for the Plaintiff.
Some evidence has already been published, for example in a 2003 email Steve Jobs expressed concern about Musicmatch opening its own music store. “We need to make sure that when Music Match launches their music store, the downloaded music won't play on the iPod. Will it be a problem?” Jobs wrote to colleagues. More evidence is expected to be released during the trial that will cause problems for Apple.
Apple's current top executives will also testify at the trial, including Phil Schiller, head of marketing, and Eddy Cue, who runs iTunes and other online services. Apple's lawyers are expected to argue that the various iTunes updates over time have mainly made improvements to Apple products rather than intentionally harming competitors and customers.
The case starts on December 2 in Oakland, and the plaintiffs are asking Apple to compensate users who purchased between December 12, 2006 and March 31, 2009 iPod classic, iPod shuffle, iPod touch or iPod nano, 350 million dollars. Circuit Judge Yvonne Rogers is presiding over the case.
The other two mentioned antitrust cases in which Apple was involved after Jobs' death involved a total of six Silicon Valley companies that allegedly colluded to reduce salaries by not hiring each other. In this case, too, many communications from Steve Jobs have emerged that point to such behavior, and it was no different in the case of price fixing of e-books. While the latter case is already apparently coming up to its end, the case of six companies and mutual non-acceptance of employees will go to court in January.
DRM was demanded by publishers and it is crazy to expect that Apple will invest in supporting competing music stores or license FairPlay and suffer the consequences of a sloppy implementation on other mp3 players... Real hacked FairPlay, which was really beyond the bounds of decent conduct, and they started crying when Apple took it away from them. Article on Daring Fireball (http://df4.us/21z) nicely describes the mess publishers have caused by insisting on DRM
Steve took DRM as a necessary evil that they approached to get to the catalogs, see Thoughts on DRM + the initial keynote about the Music store (it's good karma). Both iPod and iTunes were built as an inescapable walled garden, from the beginning there were options to burn songs to CDs and play them outside the Apple ecosystem, and the same could probably be done with things bought on the Rhapsody store... I ignore the loss of quality now, it's a matter of principle.
Can all customers who bought an iPod during that period get compensation from this court?
For US customers only.
But that is discrimination, it would be best to sue in Brussels
There are lawsuits and disputes, I can only understand in this case the greediness of the plaintiff party to take a bite out of the big apple.