Apple cleared in iPod antitrust suit

Apple hurdled on Tuesday, December 16, 2014, an antitrust suit over the iPod after a US jury cleared it of abusing its dominance in the market. AP

SAN FRANCISCO, United States – A US jury on Tuesday cleared Apple of abusing its dominant market position in an antitrust case over online music for the iPod.

The class-action antitrust case in California federal court featured dramatic videotaped testimony recorded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs before he died in 2011.

The $350-million lawsuit accused the tech giant of illegally forcing iPod users to purchase their music on its iTunes service.

The suit said iPod buyers between 2006 and 2009 were blocked from buying music from other vendors, advancing Apple’s dominant position on music downloads.

But the jury ruled otherwise.

“We thank the jury for their service and we applaud their verdict,” Apple said in a statement.

“We created iPod and iTunes to give our customers the world’s best way to listen to music. Every time we’ve updated those products — and every Apple product over the years — we’ve done it to make the user experience even better.”

Jobs’ testimony from a few months before his death in October 2011 was played at the hearing Friday.

In excerpts published by online news site “The Verge,” he said that Apple was “very concerned” about retaliatory measures that could be taken by record companies if songs purchased in iTunes and downloaded to an iPod were then copied onto somebody else’s computer.

“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 emails from the labels threatening us that they were going to yank the license,” Jobs said.

He argued that “lots of hackers” were trying to break into the system, and as a result, Apple had to be constantly “revving the iTunes and iPod software, closing any holes that might be in it, or any problems it might have.”

If these changes meant that competitors became locked out, then they were only “collateral damage,” he said.

Plaintiffs in the class-action suit argued that the repeat changes prevented other online music stores — and potentially less expensive ones at that — from adapting their own systems fast enough for their music to be used on the iPod.

This, they said, meant iPod owners had to make purchases on iTunes.

Apple has remained a powerful player in online music, but in 2009 dropped its “digital rights management” that limited how users could copy or transfer songs.

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