Antitrust Suit Filed To Halt Apple 'Music Monopoly' 510
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.'"
they just aren't paying attention, are they? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they really want to solve the incompatibility problem, they should go out and sue HD-DVD and Blu-Ray device makers for not making players that can read both formats. Or how about a video game maker that only makes his games on PS2 and not on XBox or WII? or the other end, how about suing Microsoft for not being able to play Sony PS2 games...
Re:Spluh (Score:5, Interesting)
Where do these people get this stuff?
Shipping a product without support for a desirable format? WTF? This is the whole reason we have the choice to buy hundreds of other brands of mp3 players that support both wma and ogg and mp3 as well as iTunes. I see no monopoly here.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, if I recall correctly, the PP5002c and PP5003 were simply dual ARM7 TDMIO chips with some glue and interface logic. There's nothing there that would play WMA.
This case is baseless, groundless, and sure to get paid to go away.
"Why?" is the wrong question... (Score:3, Interesting)
Say the chip supports it, and addressing the chip for WMA takes a dozen lines of code if that; then why -not- support it? As the summary says, that's just crippling the darn thing - and for what reason?
I can think of a few, most involving DRM; but Apple seems to think it perfectly reasonable to tell a user to burn a CD, then rip to MP3, if they want to listen to iTunes-DRM'd tracks on anything other than an iPod.. so surely telling the user that DRM'd WMA's will not play should suffice as far a 'tech support' goes there.
More likely, the chip vendor charges per feature used. They bake a chip that can do A, B, C, and D simply because that's cheaper than baking several different chips (do the math - there's may combinations.) Each thing it does that you license it for costs you $5 on top of a base price. So supporting A, B, D only saves you $5 per chip. That'll add up over a few hundred thousand.
Re:Spluh (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, because every time I turn on my device I really want to wait while it scans the ID3 information from 40 GB of MP3 files before it can display a menu of available tracks... that kind of logic worked great in the days of 128 MB flash players, but doesn't keep up with current tech very well...
Re:Spluh (Score:5, Interesting)
But the $20 mp3 player from a chinese manufacturer I've never heard of before or after... well, that can play almost everything. Drop files into the drive and it'll play them. Same holds true for DVD players and video formats.
Re:Spluh (Score:2, Interesting)
Not that it matters though, consumers are sheep; if I bought an iPod on name alone, I'd either get it 'free' or buy it from iTunes. "Oh, MS has cheaper songs? Well I just spent $250 on my iPod Super-Hyper-Pico Plus."
Back on the topic of actively disabling WMA, how about requiring manufacturers doing more to point out supported formats? Maybe a spiky red bubble on the front of the box saying what's supported? That way, it would look like some marvelous extra, like 'batteries included' or 'one free song download'.
"Imaginary Property" (Score:5, Interesting)
As said by other, iPod's chip would have the technical capability to play WMA.
BUT then Apple doesn't necessarily have the needed license to implement support for MS's IP.
That, specially from the point of view that, Microsoft's agreement in the "PlaysForSure" certification campaign forbids the player to support other formats except MP3 and WMA. (Which also eplains while in europe one can find a lot of devices playing OGG/Vorbis but not in the US where the device aren't allowed) And in addition PlaysForSure mendate an obscure and stupid protocol (a microsoftish hack around the Picture-Transfer-Protocole) for communicating with the device, whereas the iPod use plain simple mass storage and can work as an external hard disk too (except that the music is stored in an invisible folder).
This, had Apple decided to implement WMA (by simply turning on a function already available into hardware) they would have been forced to remove support for other formats namely the AAC around which their iTunes store is based, and switching away to a protocol that made the iPod a popular data-transport device.
Besides failing to support WMA doesn't make a monopoly. If we take into account all the compressed music file that circulated everywhere (on the net, on peer-2-peer networks, on embed device for various tasks including ringtones, etc)
MP3 is by far the most widespread standart.
AAC (iPod), WMA (Zune+PlaysForSure), ATRAC (Sony), Real Audio (Early webcasting), etc... all represent a tiny fraction next to the omnipresence of MPEG Layer III (and its ancestors).
And if people are complaining that the install base of linux is too low to be worth considering, I can't see why then people complain about some format that only represents a microscopic fraction of the market and is completely over shadowed by MP3.
All the others are only specific formats that are exclusively used between some proprietary music stores and corresponding audio players, and thus only exist in specific scenarios. The GSM codec (used in cell phones) is maybe the closest thing that comes in term of frequency of occurrence.
Re:"Imaginary Property" (Score:1, Interesting)
I could not find any references for that claim. Do you have one?
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm all for forcing Apple to open up their FairPlay DRM, but this doesn't make sense. It was the companies selling the music's choice to offer their music in WMA, knowing fully it wouldn't work on the iPod. MP3s work on the iPod, as others have mentioned. If I started selling my music in some weird proprietary format, I wouldn't expect Apple to pay me £800k year to license it, even if one of their chips had some support for it.
Apple licensing WMA wouldn't even change much. The same media is available for both suites (iTMS+iPod or PlaysForSure store/device) and there is nothing forcing anyone to choose one type of player over the other. It's not like if you buy a non-Apple player you can't use certain websites, can't connect to certain networks and can't open certain files (except the FairPlay stuff, which I said above might deserve changing). iPods supporting WMA wouldn't demonopolise anything.
Re:Standard or proprietary (Score:3, Interesting)
No. They. Don't. Where the hell this comes from is beyond me...
Let's look at the Operating Systems: It's been a while since I coded on a windows box, but I seem to remember it was MS who made you pay for an MSDN subscription (the cheapest way to get the dev-tools and all the proprietary servers and drivers you needed to actually do something useful), whereas Apple gave away their (full, professional) developer tools.
Ok, so what about the music players: It's Apple who are giving away (already announced, in February) the SDK for their music-player & phone. Can you get a Zune development kit ? Maybe you can, but I've never heard of one. If you can, will it come with a hefty price tag ?
Ok, let's look at attitude: Apple have an open-source kernel, and many open-source projects shipped as standard with their OS. Microsoft are completely closed-shop unless you're a freakin' government or similar. Apple pick areas of open-source they think they can improve (eg: WebKit), and once they've delivered it back to the community, people seem to agree (witness Webkit taking over in Nokia phones, the android API, even the KHTML source-code is being migrated to it). What's MS done recently - can you imagine internet-explorer's rendering engine being made open-source ?
Microsoft are the closed-source, closed-minded company. Apple are a breath of fresh air.
Simon
Re:Really (Score:1, Interesting)
Even Microsoft's argument that users could download Netscape didn't help. Microsoft still lost the case. If Apple persists in tying iTunes to the iPod it's going to face antitrust lawsuits.
Re:Really. Really?!! (Score:3, Interesting)
So, what is the actual problem? Are we actually seeing another SCO type 3rd party stab in preparation for a big MS push into the field? Not a bloody clue. BUT, it still stands to reason that the ability for Amazon to 1-up the iTunes store seems to break their argument a tad, don't you think? It is not a closed device, really. MP3, AAC, WAV (who really uses that?!), OGG (just joking!). If you use any of those formats, it is on! And they have a right to pander to their own store with their formats if expanding the range of compatibilities means shelling out cash to one of their competitors, don't you think?
Now, I am not exactly an Apple fanboi on this, but come ON! This is just a load of crap. They have absolutely NO corner on the market. The people who were competing with apple on this were using different methods that were all based on a competing format using a subscription service method for the most part. Amazon is beginning to show major promise for taking them on and that only came about when the record companies decided they could get multiple revenue streams from different stores only if they opened it up to ALL players through other stores. That and people want unDRMed songs.