“Apple Inc. won dismissal on procedural grounds of a lawsuit claiming the company maintains a monopoly over iPhone applications. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, ruled today that the plaintiffs weren’t in a legal position to bring the suit as they hadn’t bought the applications at issue in the case. The complaint can still be amended and refiled, Gonzalez said,” Joel Rosenblatt reports for Bloomberg. “Alexander Schmidt, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a phone interview that he’ll have ‘no difficulty’ refiling the case to meet the judge’s requirements.”
MacDailyNews Take: Half-assed fuckery.
Rosenblatt reports, “The plaintiffs failed to prove ‘collective allegations that they have been deprived of lower cost alternatives, paid higher prices for Apple-approved applications, or had their iPhones disabled or destroyed,’ Gonzalez wrote. ‘At a minimum, plaintiffs must allege facts showing that each named plaintiff has personally suffered an injury-in-fact based on Apple’s alleged conduct.’ In a suit originally filed in 2011, the same consumers argued Cupertino, California-based Apple has built a monopoly for iPhone applications because they’re only for sale at Apple’s App Store.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: First: One would assume that a large corporation such as Apple would have had competent legal advice when they set up their App Store, in order that it be set up in legal fashion.
Second: On every iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and iPad mini box, the potential buyer is informed of requirements, including “iTunes X.x or later required for some features” and also that an “iTunes Store account” is required. The plaintiffs were informed of the requirements prior to purchase. If the plaintiffs didn’t like the terms that came along with Apple devices, they should have opted for a pretend iPhone from any one of a dime-a-dozen handset assemblers. Then they could blissfully infest their fake iPhones with malware from a variety of sources.
Third: Apple doesn’t set the prices for paid apps.
Fourth: The amount by which Apple Inc. has driven down software prices across the board, on every major computing platform, makes legal actions such as this eminently laughable.