iPhone Antitrust and Computer Fraud Claims Upheld

LawWatcher writes "On October 1, 2008, a federal judge in California upheld a class action claiming that Apple and AT&T Mobility's five-year exclusive voice and data service provider agreement for the iPhone violates the anti-monopoly provisions of the antitrust laws. The court also ruled that Apple may have violated federal and California criminal computer fraud and abuse statutes by releasing version 1.1.1 of its iPhone operating software when Apple knew that doing so would damage or destroy some iPhones that had been 'unlocked' to enable use of a carrier other than AT&T."

Comments

No one deserves this more than Apple

[linzeal]

They seriously need to be taken down a notch legally so they don't lawyer up at every opportunity.

Re:No one deserves this more than Apple

[MacDork]

They would certainly deserve it for willfully bricking unlocked iPhones the way they did, but this is the US were talking about. The only people who will see any benefit are the lawyers. The rest of the world will get a voucher at the Apple store online or some other equally lame appeasement.

Good

[Darkness404]

This is excellent news for consumers. About the only area that technology is seriously lacking in, is cell phones. And it isn't because we don't have the capability, the iPhone and Android platforms proves that it isn't the case, but rather it is the cell phone companies.

Precisely

[Sparks23]

Their statement was not 'we are going to brick other people's phones,' but 'if you have messed around in the baseband firmware, we can't promise this upgrade isn't going to break something significantly.'

They didn't set out to brick phones (and quite a few unlocked phones I know of took the firmware upgrade just fine). It was more a 'look, if you did this, you're on your own; we're not promising that this firmware won't completely break your modified phone.'

Which actually seems reasonably fair; if someone takes a car and decides to tinker in the brake system and try to come up with their own antilock braking system they feel is better, that's fine. But if they then have an accident, they can't realistically hold the car manufacturer responsible for the ABS they modified.

That said, the AT&T exclusivity contact may well verge on antitrust violations; IANAL, so I cannot really speak with any authority on that. However, restricting phones to specific carriers is pretty much par for the course. T-Mobile doesn't let you use the Sidekick on AT&T, nor the new Google Android phone that just came out. As far as I know, the Instinct is exclusive to Sprint. Etc.

So if they do rule that the AT&T exclusivity contract violates antitrust, I really do hope that decision can crack the practice of carrier exclusives overall. Forcing all phones to be sold unlocked, so that they can be taken to any other carrier with compatible cellular technology, would force carriers to actually focus on providing good service rather than relying on handset exclusives.

Re:Precisely

[hobbit]

"Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone's software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed"

(From http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I'm%20Feeling%20Lucky&q=iphone+apple+statement+firmware+modified)

It's really not Apple's job to be writing workarounds for jailbroken phones (and exhaustively testing them -- what if the workarounds adversely affected unjailbroken iPhones?)

However, I would argue it is Apple's job to design the iPhone such that no changes (other than physically invasive ones) can ever cause the phone to be "permanently inoperable". And if they can't provide information to the user on how to reset the iPhone to factory defaults, they should bear the burden of repairing it.