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Closing arguments given in Apple anti-trust case

By | Published on Tuesday 16 December 2014

Apple

Lawyers presented their closing arguments yesterday in the legal battle over whether or not Apple behaved in an anti-competitive way in the earlier days of the iTunes music store, the legal team leading the charge against the IT giant having found another plaintiff last week.

As previously reported, Apple is accused of deliberately developing the software that ran on its iPod players so to stop rivals from launching download stores that worked with the then market-leading digital music player.

Although iPods could always play MP3s, for the first half decade that iTunes was in business the major labels would only sell digital tracks that came with digital rights management controls, and the only DRM system that worked on the iPod was Apple’s own, called FairPlay, and only iTunes was allowed to sell files using that technology.

Rivals, most notably RealNetworks, tried to backwards engineer their own DRM systems that would work with FairPlay, but Apple kept tweaking its system to stop those files from playing; to the extent that it’s alleged that updating software on the iPod resulted in tracks bought from rival download stores being deleted. The whole thing led to Apple having huge dominance in the digital music market, especially in the US and UK.

All this seems rather antiquated in 2014, given that the majors eventually dropped their insistence on DRM so that iTunes rivals could sell MP3s, and anyway, Apple is now rapidly losing its dominance over the digital music market as things shift over towards subscription and streaming services.

Nevertheless, long-running consumer-led legal action accusing Apple of anti-competitive behaviour only reached court recently, and if the IT firm loses the class action it might have to pay out compensation to any former customers affected by the software updates, plus an interesting precedent will be set in the tech sector.

As previously reported, those pursuing the case against Apple hit a snag earlier in the month when it turned out – the parameters of the case having been narrowed – that none of the specific claimants listed at the top of the class action could claim to have been directly affected by Apple’s alleged dodgy practices. A class action needs at least one named individual attached to it, but lawyers subsequently managed to recruit Barbara Bennett, a 65 year old ice dancer no less, to fulfil that role.

Wrapping up the case for the jury yesterday, Patrick Coughlin, repping Bennett and former iPod owners everywhere, told the court, according to CNET: “[Apple] don’t believe that you own your iPod. They believe that they still have the right to choose for you what third-party player can play on a device that you bought and you own”.

Noting the allegation that iPod software updates deleted unofficial tracks, he said that Apple set out to “degrade your experience” so that there were songs “you can play one day [and then] you can’t play the next”.

But Apple’s defender Bill Isaacson hit back, arguing that the idea everyone was losing their tracks with every iPod update was made up, and that this whole case was about lawyers postulating for the sake of it, and in doing so stifling technical innovation. He told the court: “This is all made up. It’s lawyer argument. [There is] no evidence that [track deletion] ever happened … there’s no consumers, no iPod users, no surveys, no Apple business documents”. He concluded by pleading that the jury not “hold a great company liable and tell them to stop innovating – to stop innovating based on nonsense”.

As previously reported, Apple’s official line is that the FairPlay updates were necessary to ensure the IT firm fulfilled its commitments to the DRM-hungry major labels, and that while it would have liked to make its DRM technology available to third parties, that risked making the system unreliable and consumer unfriendly.



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