“The Apple iTunes DRM trial underway in federal court here will come down to how jurors view certain code that Apple added to iTunes,” Joe Mullin writes for Ars Technica. “The plaintiffs, representing a class of about 8 million consumers as well as large retailers, say it was anything but an ‘upgrade.’ They’re seeking $351 million in damages.”
“In this lawsuit, the plaintiffs are contending that specific changes Apple made to iTunes 7.0 and 7.4 were anticompetitive,” Mullin writes. “Apple isn’t being sued for having DRM, per se, but for making tweaks to its DRM that made some forms of inter-operability, like Real Networks’ Harmony, stop working.”
“In his opening, Apple attorney William Isaacson stressed that the iTunes 7.0 and 7.4 updates in question were real product improvements, not a strategic decision to keep out Harmony,” Mullin writes. “When iTunes 7.0 and 7.4 were launched, among other changes, the company updated its encryption, he said. Real Networks’ reverse-engineering became ‘outdated’ because of those updates. ‘We changed the encryption because that’s what you do with encryption.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
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