Antitrust Suit Filed To Halt Apple 'Music Monopoly'

Dotnaught writes with word of an anti-trust lawsuit filed against Apple late last month. Information Week has the story, a suit charging the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market. "The complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA. One of the third-party components in iPods, the Portal Player System-On-A-Chip, supports WMA, according to the complaint. 'Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format,' the complaint states. 'Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as crippling a product, and software that does this is known as crippleware.'"

Comments

Re:Spluh

[treeves]

You do have a choice not to buy an iPod, however, you can't use AAC format files on some other players, so you can't put music from iTunes on them.

Re:Spluh

[Arthur B.]

Shhhhhhs of course not. The companies are the one forcing you to use their proprietary format because the alternatives don't look as good, silly you. Please get a lobotomy, and you'll look at antitrust laws like a good /.er