“Three years after his death, Steve Jobs is very much a presence in courtrooms across the country,” Brian X. Chen reports for The New York Times. “Executives are often told by their lawyers to be careful what they put in writing for fear it will end up as evidence in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Jobs did not get the memo. His emails in past lawsuits — a mix of blunt litigation threats against his opponents and cheery financial promises for potential business partners — have made him an exceptional witness against his own company, even beyond the grave.”
“In December, the company is set to go to trial in the third major antitrust lawsuit it has faced since Mr. Jobs died. His emails will play an important role in the case, as they did in the last two,” Chen reports. “But lawyers will probably have to work hard to give his statements a positive spin. The potential damages — around $350 million — are a pittance for a company that in its last quarter had an $8.5 billion profit.”
“The latest case to bring Mr. Jobs’s spirit into a courtroom is set to begin on Tuesday in Oakland, Calif. It is a class action involving older iPods, which played only songs sold in the iTunes Store, or those downloaded from CDs, not music from competing stores,” Chen reports. “A few of the emails have already been made public. In one, sent in 2003 to other Apple executives, Mr. Jobs expressed concern about Musicmatch, a software company, opening its own music store. ‘We need to make sure that when Music Match launches their download music store they cannot use iPod,’ he wrote. ‘Is this going to be an issue?’ …Apple’s lawyers are expected to try to show that various iTunes updates were designed to make improvements to its products rather than deliberately cripple a competitor and did not harm consumers. And they will probably point out that the price of iPods have gone down over the years, not up, regardless of what Apple did with its software.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This lawsuit should target those who demanded DRM on music to “protect” it, not Apple which was forced to develop and use FairPlay by the music cartels.
Related articles:
How to kill the DRM in your old iTunes Store music purchases – March 18, 2014
Apple asks judge to dismiss FairPlay lawsuit following Steve Jobs’ deposition – April 19, 2011
Apple’s iTunes Store goes DRM-free and 3G via iPhone; variable pricing coming soon – January 6, 2009
Major music cartels demand concessions from Apple before inking DRM-free iTunes Store music deals – December 15, 2008
RealNetworks ‘Harmony’ stops working on iPods but nobody notices for a month and a half – December 15, 2004
Real’s online petition for music ‘freedom’ backfires bigtime – August 17, 2004
Real cracks Apple’s Fairplay; to sell iPod-compatible songs without Apple’s authorization – July 25, 2004
Jobs to Glaser: Go pound sand – April 16, 2004
If DRM was required and Apple had a propriety DRM, then Apple had no requirement, from any authority, to install every other DRM known to man.
The comments on the article are absolutely idiotic and ignorant of what was going on at the time. I posted this:
Get a grip people.
1. Everyone thot the iPod was overpriced and doomed to failure. Everyone else who tried to produce a Mp3 played failed. Of course Apple wanted to protect it.
2. The iTunes music store was a huge and difficult gamble at the time–and still is. Everyone from Walmart to Microsoft to Sony to Coke to Nokia to McDonald’s tried to set up an online music store AND FAILED! Yes, Apple wanted to protect that investment.
3. The record companies are the ones who pushed HARD for DRM, not Jobs. They wanted to force everyone into lifetime music rentals. Jobs convincing them to sell tracks for 99 cents was an amazing victory for consumers who had been forced to buy “bundles” of songs known then as CDs.
4. NO OTHER company would have published an open letter(in 2007) asking the record companies to ditch DRM. Sony, Microsoft, Real, Nokia, and the record companies LOVED DRM because they thought it locked out competitors and stopped piracy.
5. Why didn’t Apple’s competitors offer DRM free music at the time? That would have completely negated Apple’s supposed “lock-out” of competition.
6. Anyone with half a brain could take their DRM’d music, burn a CD, then rip it back into any platform.
Sheesh.
How did this lawsuit make it past the “you bought software hobbled files from a different company on you want Apple to do what about it?” phase?
Well, damn. Based on the title, I was hoping for a Steve Jobs hologram,
I was paying close attention back during the early iPod+iTunes days. Most, I thought all, of those “competing stores” sold DRM’d WMA tracks. The only way the iPod was going to play those was if Apple agreed to pay Microsoft a license fee and implemented their DRM. In what universe could Apple be penalized for not wanting to do that?
——RM
I can’t use Bic razors with my expensive Gillette razor. Who wants to join me in a class action lawsuit?