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Antitrust Suit Filed To Halt Apple 'Music Monopoly'

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the a-bit-too-popular dept.

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.'"

2 of 510 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Spluh by Romancer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --


    ) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
    ) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
  2. Re:Wow by vought · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.