“In a trial about whether Apple’s iTunes was the lynchpin in shutting out competitors and making it harder for consumers to take their music elsewhere, today was Apple’s chance to explain what it was doing with its software nearly a decade ago,” Josh Lowensohn reports for The Verge. “To do that, Apple’s iTunes chief Eddy Cue today spent several hours testifying in an Oakland, California courtroom, mainly trying to explain why the company not only created its own digital rights management (DRM) software, but also why it didn’t share it widely with others.”
“Cue argued that Apple abhorred DRM, but had to implement it in order to broker deals with record labels that collectively controlled 80 percent of the music market,” Lowensohn reports. “After investigating existing solutions, Cue says Apple decided to make its own called Fairplay, which it contemplated licensing to other companies. But today Cue said that there were technical issues keeping that from ever happening. ‘We thought about licensing the DRM from beginning, it was one of the things we thought was the right move that because we can expand the market and grow faster,’ Cue said. ‘But we couldn’t find a way to do that and have it work reliably.'”
“As issue, Cue said, were things like interoperability with the growing multitude of MP3 players. New devices from other companies would come out, and might not work with that system,” Lowensohn reports. “‘Others tried to do this, and it failed miserably,’ Cue said. ‘One of those was Microsoft.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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