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El Reg reports
Apple has prevailed in an almost decade-long antitrust legal battle over the way its iPod gadgets handled music not obtained through iTunes.
A federal jury in Oakland, California, took just four hours to clear the iThings maker of wrongdoing--and tossed out calls for a $351[M] compensation package for eight million owners of late-2000s iPods. That figure could have been tripled if the iPhone giant had lost its fight.
Apple was accused in a class-action lawsuit of designing its software to remove music and other files from iPods that weren't purchased or ripped via iTunes--but the eight-person jury decided that mechanism was a legit feature.
[...]It was argued that Apple had deliberately set up iTunes to report iPods as damaged if they stored music that, essentially, wasn't sanctioned by Apple: if alien files were found by the software, users were told to restore their devices to factory settings, effectively wiping songs not purchased from or ripped from CD by iTunes.
Apple countered that it was only preventing iPods from being hacked or damaged by third-party data. The company said the protections were implemented to prevent people from listening to pirated music--a claim the jury upheld.
Related:
Apple Deleted Rivals' Songs from Users' iPods - Class-Action Suit
Apple's Intentional iPod Lock-in Efforts - Engineer Testifies in Court
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @03:36AM
My understanding of this case is that Apple was (and still is) actively anti-competitive, but since the iTunes release contained new features in addition to the anti-competitive code Apple is not guilty.
I'm not really surprised. Once the big players started selling users expensive hardware, while simultaneously preventing the users from using their property, their way it was all down hill.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Tork on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:21AM
My understanding of this case is that Apple was (and still is) actively anti-competitive, but since the iTunes release contained new features in addition to the anti-competitive code Apple is not guilty.
Apple isn't guilty because Real was trying to mimic their DRM and failed at it. Basically Apple was dumping broken files. Apple is arrogant, but Real did this one to themselves.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:49AM
That is an exceptionalli kind characterization. The files were only 'broken' because the spec was needlessly baroque. They were not broken in a way that interfered with the functions of cataloguing or playback. No other functionality is of value to the device owner, so if Apple is enforcing that, just who are they helping by doing so?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:28AM
The files being broken is how Apple was able to detect them. Just because they were able to play back at the time doesn't mean a future firmware update wouldn't break it.
There are plenty of reasons to rag on Apple, this isn't one of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @02:36PM
The files being broken is how Apple was able to detect them. Just because they were able to play back at the time doesn't mean a future firmware update wouldn't break it.
That is just as disingenuous as Tork's defense. They were only 'broken' in a way that that doesn't matter to the user. If any future update coincidentally couldn't handle them for functional reasons, then cross that bridge when it happens. After all, storage errors happen all the time anyway, gamma rays flip bits on occasion, so the code has to handle corrupt files anyway.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:32PM
And, no, varying from the spec is not the same as bit errors. That's like saying you can write a JPEG decoder that has error-checking that is so good it'll read PNGs.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @06:41PM
The iPod would get a firmware update through iTunes, at which point that "crossing the bridge" would not be done on a battery powered device with minimal memory and cpu power but on the computer running iTunes.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday December 18 2014, @06:47PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @03:10PM
The assumptions you base your apologia on are kind of amazing. It is a level of delusion, a slanting of half-truths to such an extreme, that the only reasonable explanation is that you have some sort of hang-up that causes you to defend such blatantly anti-customer behavior.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday December 19 2014, @04:11PM
The assumptions you base your apologia on are kind of amazing.
Lol.
...the only reasonable explanation is that you have some sort of hang-up that causes you to defend such blatantly anti-customer behavior.
The hang-up that I have is that I read about it. If you had, you could have had a rebuttal instead of playing the shill card.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:22AM
There is no way in hell any US court will find against Apple in any case that matters. They pretty much own politicians and the judiciary there.
It's a shame, because they've become a hugely damaging company, and are getting worse now that they realize controls won't be applied to them.