“Steve Jobs defended Apple Inc.’s use of software for the iPod and iTunes that blocked compatibility with a competing digital music store as necessary to protect licenses with major record labels,” Joel Rosenblatt reports for Bloomberg. “Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive officer, was questioned six months before he died in October 2011 by lawyers for consumers who sued the company over claims it tried to thwart rival music stores to maintain a monopoly over digital players. A video recording of his testimony may be played this week for a jury in federal court in Oakland, California, where a trial of the case got under way yesterday.”
“‘Apple’s point of view was, you know, we were the only big company involved in this stuff at that time, the one with the deepest pockets,’ Jobs said in the 2011 testimony, according to a transcript made public yesterday. Apple had ‘black-and-white contracts’ with record labels that would be violated if consumers could strip licensed songs from iPods and install them on other devices, he said,” Rosenblatt reports. “‘So I remember we were very concerned about that,’ Jobs added. ‘And we went to great pains to make sure that people couldn’t hack into our digital rights management system because if they could, we would get nasty e-mails from the labels threatening us to — you know, that they were going to yank the license.'”
Rosenblatt reports, “Attorneys for Apple told the jury in their opening statement yesterday that the company created its own software, FairPlay, to safeguard contractual agreements with the record labels.”
Read 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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