Apple comes out victorious in iPod anti-trust lawsuit

Steven Loeb · December 16, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3aee

Jury unanimously finds that Apple was improving iTunes when it blocked music from other services

Put one in the win column for Apple.

The company had been battling a decade-long class-action lawsuit by a group of iPod users, who accused the company of stifling competition by not allowing them to put music from other services onto their devices.

The trial finally ended on Monday and on Tuesday the eight-person jury in U.S. District Court in Oakland, California ruled unanimously in favor of Apple, according to the Wall Street Journal. Deliberations only lasted eight hours.

At the heart of this case was a 2006 update to iTunes, version 7.0, which used DRM software to restrict music downloaded from services other than iTunes from being uploaded onto iPod devices.

Apple did admit that it had been deleting such music off said devices. When a user who had downloaded music from a rival service tried to sync an iPod to the user’s iTunes library, Apple would display an error message and instruct the user to restore the factory settings. When the user restored the settings, the music from rival services would disappear.

Augustin Farrugia, Apple's security director, defended the practice, however, citing security reason. He said hackers made the company "very paranoid” and that deleting any non-Apple music files was an attempt to stop future hackings. He also said that that Apple did not tell people because the company thought that users would not understand why it was doing this, though saying it is for security reasons seems easy enough to grasp.

It was actually security updates that allowed Apple to prevail in this case. Jurors were asked to answer one question: if the updates genuinely improved the product.

Apple had argued during the case that the updates to iTunes 7.0  had added new security features that were beneficial to customers. Apple's lawyers also argued that the lawyers for the plaintiffs had failed to show that anyone was truly harmed by the update. The jury apparently agreed with that assessment.

The plaintiffs in the case, who represented around eight million potentially harmed consumers who bought iPod between 2006 and 2009, had been asking for $350 million, though the payout could have been triple that amount due to antitrust laws, meaning that Apple might have to pay out over $1 billion if it had lost.

“We created iPod and iTunes to give our customers the world’s best way to listen to music,” said in a statement to multiple news outlets following the verdict. “Every time we’ve updated those products -- and every Apple product over the years -- we’ve done it to make the user experience even better.”

(Image source: comofunciona.com)

Support VatorNews by Donating

Read more from our "Trends and news" series

More episodes