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

they just aren't paying attention, are they?

[acroyear]

When the market is demanding, and receiving, DRM-free tunes at amazon, iTunes, and a number of smaller label-run sites (Deutsche Grammophon and Naxos, for example), the restrictiveness of one product to not play another's deprecated and irrelevant format is a rather trite thing. As far as I know, there's never been a precedent for "incompatibility" unless there's a contract violation clause to attach it to.

If they really want to solve the incompatibility problem, they should go out and sue HD-DVD and Blu-Ray device makers for not making players that can read both formats. Or how about a video game maker that only makes his games on PS2 and not on XBox or WII? or the other end, how about suing Microsoft for not being able to play Sony PS2 games...

Re:Spluh

[Romancer]

And kinda funny since the Zune shipped without support for Microsofts own "Play for Sure" music.

Where do these people get this stuff?

Shipping a product without support for a desirable format? WTF? This is the whole reason we have the choice to buy hundreds of other brands of mp3 players that support both wma and ogg and mp3 as well as iTunes. I see no monopoly here.

Re:Wow

[vought]

It means that the hardware has enough memory and enough DSP horsepower to decode it when combined with an appropriate software codec. This is a case of licensing or not licensing the WMA codec, not just the crypto. IIRC, the PP5002c was sold as a standalone chip to Apple, but Portal Player was trying to sell an entire OS/Chip solution. Apple sourced the iPod's first OS from Pixo, so there was no WMA built into it - and it's also why Portal never wanted to acknowledge Apple being a customer (when I contracted for them, we were not allowed to mention Apple, only the customer named "Baseband"). Because Apple didn't use Portal's entire solution, they were not someone portal wanted to talk about.

Also, if I recall correctly, the PP5002c and PP5003 were simply dual ARM7 TDMIO chips with some glue and interface logic. There's nothing there that would play WMA.

This case is baseless, groundless, and sure to get paid to go away.

Re:Spluh

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

If your mp3 player doesn't load as a "mass storage device" and let you just swap the materials back and forth, then YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG PLAYER.

Yeah, because every time I turn on my device I really want to wait while it scans the ID3 information from 40 GB of MP3 files before it can display a menu of available tracks... that kind of logic worked great in the days of 128 MB flash players, but doesn't keep up with current tech very well...

Re:Spluh

[Toonol]

My own experience is that the cheaper the electronics, the more off-brand, the more useful it is. Apple? Sony? Microsoft? They do what they can to squeeze you into certain formats, certain online stores, etc...

But the $20 mp3 player from a chinese manufacturer I've never heard of before or after... well, that can play almost everything. Drop files into the drive and it'll play them. Same holds true for DVD players and video formats.

"Imaginary Property"

[DrYak]

An iPod clone, the Medion Jukebox, was built using the exact same chip and stuff and indeed it did play WMA.

As said by other, iPod's chip would have the technical capability to play WMA.
BUT then Apple doesn't necessarily have the needed license to implement support for MS's IP.

That, specially from the point of view that, Microsoft's agreement in the "PlaysForSure" certification campaign forbids the player to support other formats except MP3 and WMA. (Which also eplains while in europe one can find a lot of devices playing OGG/Vorbis but not in the US where the device aren't allowed) And in addition PlaysForSure mendate an obscure and stupid protocol (a microsoftish hack around the Picture-Transfer-Protocole) for communicating with the device, whereas the iPod use plain simple mass storage and can work as an external hard disk too (except that the music is stored in an invisible folder).

This, had Apple decided to implement WMA (by simply turning on a function already available into hardware) they would have been forced to remove support for other formats namely the AAC around which their iTunes store is based, and switching away to a protocol that made the iPod a popular data-transport device.

Besides failing to support WMA doesn't make a monopoly. If we take into account all the compressed music file that circulated everywhere (on the net, on peer-2-peer networks, on embed device for various tasks including ringtones, etc)
MP3 is by far the most widespread standart.
AAC (iPod), WMA (Zune+PlaysForSure), ATRAC (Sony), Real Audio (Early webcasting), etc... all represent a tiny fraction next to the omnipresence of MPEG Layer III (and its ancestors).
And if people are complaining that the install base of linux is too low to be worth considering, I can't see why then people complain about some format that only represents a microscopic fraction of the market and is completely over shadowed by MP3.
All the others are only specific formats that are exclusively used between some proprietary music stores and corresponding audio players, and thus only exist in specific scenarios. The GSM codec (used in cell phones) is maybe the closest thing that comes in term of frequency of occurrence.