“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.
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