Apple To Face $350 Million Trial Over iPod DRM

An anonymous reader writes: A U.S. district judge ruled last week that a decade-old antitrust lawsuit regarding Apple's FairPlay DRM can move forward to a jury trial (PDF). The plaintiffs claim that in 2004, when "Real Networks launched a new version of RealPlayer that competed with iTunes," Apple issued an update to iTunes that prevented users from using their iPods to play songs obtained from RealPlayer. Real Networks updated its compatibility software in 2006, and Apple introduced a new version of iTunes that also rendered Real Networks's new update ineffective. The plaintiffs reason that they were thus "locked in" to Apple's platform, and as a result "Apple was able to overcharge its customers to the tune of tens of millions of dollars". If the plaintiffs succeed, media content purchased online may go the way of CDs and be playable on competing devices.

Comments

Apple did us a favor

[Technician]

i for one am glad Apple took this course of action. It made it abundantly clear that DRM is a failed business plan. Between the Mini Disk MO player/recorder with serial copy protection and then iTunes with copy protection, they left a void that quickly became filled with alternatives with much higher compatabiliy. DRM simply meant incompatability to many as the Mini Disk was incompatible with desktop music production. It gave way to simple recordable CD's. DAT tape, competing company, with mandated DRM was knifed in the cradle. In my life I have only seen one DAT tape recorder, but neve any tapes for it. It was pretty much a dead format due to DRM.

The huge public awareness of DRM and incompatibility was presented to the public with iTunes and it's incompatibility with everything else. DVD player could play MP3 CD's and DVD's. In dash car stereos began to support MP3 CD's and some play MP3's on a thumb drive. A few supported an iPod dock, but none could directy play Apple DRM content which made the public aware of the problem.

Apple finally had to support non DRM industry compatability to stay alive.

Thank you Apple for educating the large portion of the public. DRM on music is mostly a thing of the past.

Re: Apple did us a favor

[Karlt1]

Apple finally had to support non DRM industry compatability to stay alive.

Apple supported DRM free music before any of the other stores sold DRM free music from the major labels.

Steve Jobs wrote "Thoughts on Music" where he publicly asked the labels to let Apple and all of the other companies sell DRM free music instead of licensing FairPlay (what the industry wanted) months before music stores start selling DRM free music.

Re:Old issue

[UnknowingFool]

Yes it reminds me of the Palm Pre iTunes sync fiasco. Now Palm could have (1) written their own sync software and music library (2) read Apple's iTunes XML library or (3) trick iTunes into thinking that a Palm was an iPod. Palm chose #3. Then when Apple enforced the USB device recognition parameters to lock them out, Palm complained to the USB Implementers Forum but the USB IF scolded Palm instead for breaking rules on how USB devices should identify themselves.