The verdict is in, and after nearly a decade of legal wrangling, Apple has prevailed in the class-action lawsuit seeking over $1 billion in damages by iPod owners who claimed the company conspired to kill competing music services by adding restrictions to iTunes.
The eight-person jury found Apple not liable of adding DRM restrictions as an anti-competitive move toward rival players like RealNetworks from 2006 to 2009. The Verge reports that the jury unanimously delivered the verdict this morning and said that iTunes 7.0 is a “genuine product improvement” that increased security for consumers.
Apple’s victory means it’s off the hook for the $1 billion in damages the plaintiffs were seeking. The group originally claimed damages around $350 million to pay the 8 million iPod owners represented in the case.
Apple’s legal team argued that the iTunes DRM restrictions were added as a measure to thwart hackers so that it wouldn’t be in violation of its music deals with the record labels. Plaintiffs claimed Apple broke competing music services’ compatibility with iTunes via a series of software updates. Apple countered that its ecosystem was built from the ground up to only work with Apple products and that it’s unreasonable to think a third-party would have zero problems.
The antitrust case against Apple began building in 2005, but in a strange turn of events at the Oakland courtroom, all the plaintiffs dropped out of the case after it was discovered that none of their iPods were purchased during the window the accused Apple of tampering with third-party music. An emergency plaintiff was flown in, but Apple asked the court to dismiss the case altogether last Monday.
A dismissal would have saved the court about a week of proceedings. The two week trial ended with a slam dunk victory for Apple, but after the verdict was read, head attorney Patrick Couglin said the plaintiff is already planning an appeal.
Source: The Verge
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
3 responses to “Apple wins at last: iTunes DRM was ‘genuine improvement,’ jury finds”
Ha!
This makes me happy. Real Networks Was a Joke –
I can understand the concern of those bringing the case but this is like suing 8-Track machines for not letting them play music purchased on cassettes. With each new technology there’s so many vested interests at stake and so many competing platform that you can’t realistically single one out for being anticompetitive if you a. agree to use their system (and they did by signing EULA) b. obviously have a gripe against it because it became dominant. There were still loads of other players in the market but Apple proved that their system was the ‘best’ for the majority of all concerned. Look at the mess Microsoft caused with their ‘Play’ debacle. Real Networks was a ball of crap at the best of times and Napster was the devil to anyone in the music business. Apple managed to get consensus from business that gave the consumer a better end product. They should drop the appeal and just get over it.