The $350 million class action lawsuit against Apple might not even have a legitimate plaintiff anymore, but the trial continued in Oakland today with one of the key witnesses being none other than Steve Jobs himself.
The late Apple CEO appeared on a TV monitor in court today in an unreleeased deposition video that was filmed six months before his death in 2011. CNET reports that in the video Steve Jobs maintained the same stance as Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller earlier this week, that Apple wasn’t trying to block competitors and hurt customers by removing some songs off of iPods. It was simply protecting iTunes from hackers and trying to not violate its record label contracts.
Jobs’ demeanor and responses reportedly suggested he wasn’t taking the antitrust case very seriously, and that Apple didn’t perceive any competitors as legitimate threats.
“We had pretty much black and white contracts with the labels,” Jobs said in the deposition. Those contracts stipulated that if people violated Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management system, a technology that would detect other music stores’ song files and prevent users from loading them onto the iPod, “…that would be in clear violation of the licenses we had from the labels and they could cease giving us music at any time.”
Plaintiffs accuse Apple of designing iTunes so that music files from competing music services were scrubbed off iPods before they could sync to users’ libraries. Apple’s witnesses have insisted that the company only did this out of security concerns. Steve Jobs said Apple was “very scared” that hackers were trying to “do things that would put us in noncompliance with the contracts” it had with record labels.
Lawyers also accused Apple of intentionally breaking competitors software with iTunes updates that destroyed third-parties apps, but Jobs said it was just “collateral damage” for keeping iTunes safe.
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
9 responses to “Steve Jobs defends Apple from the grave in iPod lawsuit”
Wait…..so you can legitimately have your software corrupt other software on your computer? Perhaps I read that wrong.
What software is corrupting which software? iTunes interacts with i devices, nothing else. If you had read the story, Apple were obligated to NOT allow pirated music on their devices, as per their agreement with the record companies. Indeed you read something that clearly wasn’t written.
Last paragraph:
“Lawyers also accused Apple of intentionally breaking competitors software with iTunes updates that destroyed third-parties apps, but Jobs said it was just “collateral damage” for keeping iTunes safe.”
Meaning Jobs admitted that iTunes had broken competitor software hidden within updates to iTunes, giving it the functionality to do so.
Please clarify your claim of corrupting, thank you.
“breaking competitors software” = “corrupt competitors software” . To corrupt a software/file means to damage it in some way or a.k.a. “Break” it in this case. The term is often used amongst people who actually KNOW how to use a computer. You welcome.
Nice to see you’ve learnt how to use a dictionary, but you failed to explain, how in this instance, it specifically affected third party software. I’ll await your non generic response with something more than copy and paste answers.
I’m not wasting my time on a troll or this post anymore, its already too old.
Troll? Ha ha!! You see, I assumed you actually had something intelligent to contribute other than parroting a lawyers line. Silly me.
I don’t see what the issue is. I am still using the same 5th generation iPod I was using when I bought it way back when and I also had Amazon music on their too. I never had my Amazon music or MP3s from any other source get deleted.