SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, @05:47AM
Apple was once a small company. They had to get customers from the big boys that had lots of customers and did not mind losing them.
Apple is now a big company. There will be other small companies who have to get customers, and Apple is paving the way for their customers to jump ship.
Bosses think differently from workingfolk.
One thing workingfolk know is they are guaranteed to get fired if they tell the boss they won't do something then get into the boss's office and throw his files away.
When one gets promoted too high, they often forget that. Their job seems secured by who they know, not what they do.
Only large overfinanced companies have the luxury of retaining folks who think that rubbing their customers the wrong way is good for business.
It takes two people to destroy a corporation... one actually does the deed, while the other keeps him on the payroll.
The trick is to find the man who will hire you to trash his firm.