Antitrust Suit Filed To Halt Apple 'Music Monopoly'

Dotnaught writes with word of an anti-trust lawsuit filed against Apple late last month. Information Week has the story, a suit charging the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market. "The complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA. One of the third-party components in iPods, the Portal Player System-On-A-Chip, supports WMA, according to the complaint. 'Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format,' the complaint states. 'Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as crippling a product, and software that does this is known as crippleware.'"

This is /.

[elrous0]

Microsoft bad
Apple good
Linux great
Fire bad

Apple's response...

[ashitaka]

Sosumi

Re:Wow

[Rosyna]

You're going to force Apple to license Microsoft's DRM? That's retarded.

Yup. The solution to Apple being accused of being a monopolist is to have them license DRM from a convicted monopolist. Seems simple enough.

Re:This is /.

[oahazmatt]

Microsoft bad
Apple good
Linux great
Fire bad

Microsoft + Fire neat.

Re:This is /.

[Foofoobar]

Oh I'm sorry... are you more familiar with Facebook?

Mean people R bad
Backstreet Boys good
Hanna Montana great
Parents bad

Re:OGG!

[Kuukai]

Is ogg on the chip too? If so we have ourselves a case.

Re:Plays MP3's just fine

[cstdenis]

IIRC they do not play MP3. iTunes converts files from mp3 to AAC on the fly.

Re:Wow

[SharpFang]

The nice, simple and cool alternative is if iPods were mp3-enabled. No DRM. Songs from any source can be used, except of few chosen ones that use DRM ;)

Re:Wow

[HardCase]

Dumbest, article, ever.

Clearly you weren't around during the Jon Katz era.

Discrimination!

[KetchupKyle]

"...is known as crippling a product, and software that does this is known as crippleware.'" ... ....soooooooooooo my ipod isn't wheelchair accessible?

!apple_records

[yincrash]

I was confused at first. I knew the Beatles were popular, but not that popular.

Re:Spluh

[badasscat]

You could just organize your music in a meaningful way. I'd suggest Artist - Album/# - Title.Extension.

I've been doing this for ages with 25 GB of music on my iPod, and just use Amarok to generate playlists (plain M3U), and Perl scripts to adjust them accordingly.

That sounds so much easier than just dragging my mp3's into iTunes and, well, being done.

Oh wait, no it doesn't.

Re:Really

[NaugaHunter]

I think perhaps it's more about why there are no 3rd party iTunes stores?

They're called 'buy the CD and do it yourself'. There's probably a store in your town!

Re:Really

[LKM]

I think perhaps it's more about why there are no 3rd party iTunes stores?

You mean like the Amazon MP3 store, which, you know... exists?