“An antitrust lawsuit filed against Apple on Dec. 31 charges the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market,” Thomas Claburn reports for InformationWeek.
“Plaintiff Stacie Somers, represented by attorneys Craig Briskin and Steven Skalet of Mehri & Skalet PLLC, Alreen Haeggquist of Haeggquist Law Group, and Helen Zeldes, alleges that Apple dominates the market for online video, online music, and digital music players and that its dominance constitutes a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The attorneys are seeking to have their lawsuit certified as a class action,” Claburn reports.
“The complaint against Apple claims that the company controls 75% of the online video market, 83% of the online music market, more than 90% of the hard-drive based music player market, and 70% of the Flash-based music player market,” Claburn reports.
“The complaint takes issue with Apple’s refusal to support [Microsoft’s] Windows Media Audio format.’Apple’s iPod is alone among mass-market Digital Music Players in not supporting the WMA format,’ it states, noting that America Online, Wal-Mart, Napster, MusicMatch, Best Buy, Yahoo Music, FYE Download Zone, and Virgin Digital all support WMA files,” Claburn reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A monopoly, which this isn’t anyway, is legal. It’s monopoly abuse that’s illegal. Where’s the abuse? iPods also play MP3, WAV, AIFF, among other formats. Where’s the exclusion? What is Apple supposed to do, support every also-ran, failed format in the world?