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January 4, 2008

legal

Under the gavel: iTunes isn’t antitrust-worthy

Posted Jan. 4, ’08, 8:25 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Legal

RumpolePeople never get tired of suing Apple. I suppose that’s just the American way, though. Squeezing in just before the year end, the latest lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and alleges that Apple is stifling competition by not supporting Windows DRM on the iPod and by using a DRM scheme that’s incompatible with other music players. The plaintiff, Stacie Somers, filed the suit after buying an iPod from Target, but others who have bought an iPod or content from the iTunes Store any time after December 31st, 2003 are eligible to join the class action suit.

Pish tosh, say we (in an appropriately snooty tone). The suit apparently goes so far as to claim that users can only buy music from the iTunes Store, which we all know is purely and utterly ridiculous. How soon we forget those lovely shiny discs that still fill shelves in music stores the world over. Nobody holds a gun to your head to make you buy music from iTunes. And while the suit also suggests that licensing the WMA DRM for the iPod would have cost Apple a mere $800,000, those numbers are for 2005. By the same formula, it would have cost them almost twice that much (over $1.5 million) in 2007. Sure, Apple’s got plenty of cash in the bank, but that doesn’t mean they want to be shelling out $1.5 million to Microsoft every year.

Plus, with the advent of DRM-free tracks from both iTunes and Amazon, DRM-based lock-in is quickly becoming a thing of the past. And if you want to point a finger for the lack of DRM-free tracks on iTunes from labels other than EMI, try looking at Universal and Warner, who’ve both decided to play hardball by holding out on Apple whilst making the same tunes available from Amazon. Apple’s shown that they’re willing to go DRM-free if the labels are. The ball’s in their court, not the U.S. Northern District of California’s.


2 Comments

Hywel said:

I think they've gone at it from the wrong angle. The problem isn't that Apple won't stump up for WMA, it's that it won't license Fairplay, and it removed support for other players from iTunes.

iTunes used to allow all sorts of devices to sync before the iPod came along. Removing this was an anti-competitive move (though they didn't have a monopoly or a windows version of iTunes, or a store at the time).

Some of this crap may still be to do with the terms that the labels would agree to, like not being able to copy stuff back from the iPod, which would be difficult to limit on other devices (which just store stuff in visible directory hierarchies).

So I think there are abuse-of-monopoly aspects to iTunes, but honestly, WMA isn't where it's at. These guys are knobs.

January 4, 2008 9:43 AM
Greg said:

Suing to get protected WMA is the new monopoly lawsuit. They've already tried the iPod/iTunes/Fairplay monopoly lawsuit (if I remember this right, and if I also remember, it failed).

So in order to get a chink in the armor, they're going for something else.

January 5, 2008 9:01 AM

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