Slashdot Mirror
Virgin Accuses Apple of Abusing Monopoly
worm eater writes "The Register reports that VirginMega (Virgin Group's online music venture in France) is asking the French antitrust authorities to force Apple to license the FairPlay DRM. If France agrees with Virgin, will this be a blessing in disguise for Apple, making their DRM format the defacto standard, or will it be the downfall of the mighty iTunes Music Store?"
In this case, Apple is C). And, it's very very hard to say they have a 'monopoly' position, especially coming from a RECORD LABEL.
If said RECORD LABEL wants the monopoly to end, they should maybe consider the (literally) hundreds of companies willing to get into the online music distribution business. After all, a RECORD LABEL would have the power to license songs to any other business they choose.
This is absurd. If Apple has a monopoly, it's because the RECORD LABELS gave it to them. This is called playing both sides against the middle.
Virgin claims that Apple is abusing a "dominant" position by not licensing its own DRM.
But "dominant" is not really applcable yet. Are they dominant in music sales overall? No way. Are they dominant in being able to play music you buy online? Not even that is true, since the percentage of PC's is so much larger than Macs.
Perhaps at some distant point, when online music sales erally exceed physical CD sales (if ever?) then Apple might be called "dominant". In this case it's like a black hole calling the kettle black.
There is even an out if they REALLY want to sell music that can play on an iPod - MP3. Just because that format lacks technological features they would like, does that really give them cause to proclaim Apple is a monopoly that should be forced to share?
It will be interesting to see what the courts make of it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Just use the User-Agent Switcher, works for me."
Terrible advice IMHO. The more that other browsers identify as IE, the less likely these lazy designers will ever catch a clue. Do the world a favor and send them an e-mail explaining why you won't be back instead. It might not get through to them, but acquiescing definitely won't.
Just my 40% of a nickel...
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
Apple has just as much as a monopoly on FairPlay as Nike has on Air Jordans. That is, they have a monopoly on a product, not a monopoly on the music player/music store market. By revenue, Apple has a 55 percent market share for mp3 players. By units, only 31 percent. I don't know how much of a market share iTunes has, but FairPlay songs are only able to be played on 31 percent of mp3 players. Good luck crying monopoly in court on a company whose market share isn't even close to a majority.
They do have competitors, and those competitors are obliged to compete. If they can't, tough.
No, they never will. At least they won't if they value their company, their products, their income, and the people who support all that. The Apple clone market was a resounding fuckup. That idiot CEO should be flogged for what he did. He caused an absolute nightmare for support. People didn't call Epson or Umax for tech support. Oh no. They saw the Apple logo and called Apple for support. The Umax and Epson clones were the worst of the lot. At an Apple Service Center I worked at we had racks of dead Epson and Umax clones. They couldn't be fixed. The companies refused to honor the warranties. They were POSs. DayStar and Power Computing did a pretty damned good job of making clones (especially the SMP DayStar boxes) but that still didn't fix the support issue. The Radius machines were also junk. The clone "experiment" was far and away a horrible fuckup that we all should hope never happens again.
And it wasn't Jean that licensed the OS and CHRP platform to the cloners. It was Spindler.