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Antitrust Suit Filed To Halt Apple 'Music Monopoly'
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jan 03, 2008 06:03 PM
from the a-bit-too-popular dept.
from the a-bit-too-popular dept.
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.'"
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Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Yup. The solution to Apple being accused of being a monopolist is to have them license DRM from a convicted monopolist. Seems simple enough.
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for this to be an issue at all, there needs to be a DRM scheme that is an open standard. Currently there isn't, so the lawsuit has exactly 0 legs to stand on. Apple decided to create their own DRM instead of licensing and implementing the DRM of a convicted monopolist who tends to randomly deprecate their old DRM products. The only thing Apple has a monopoly on is DRMed tracks on their music system. Apple sells DRM-free music, and DRM-free music from anywhere else can also be loaded on an iPod in a number of industry standard formats.
That said, I don't own an iPod as it doesn't have the feature set I want. I have no problems with Apple's iPod/iTS product offering though. It might be anticompetitive, but it isn't illegal and it definitely is not monopolistic. That'd be like saying Apple iMacs are monopolistic because they won't play DRM'd WMV files.
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
It also has a USB interface. But the first two generations of iPod don't.
The PP5002c can decode video. But no iPods until the fifth generation did so.
The PP5002c also had lots of other logic in it that wasn't used by Apple. I can't possibly see how this is supposed to be an argument that Apple was supposed to support WMA.
Another harassment suit. I hope it gets kicked out of court quickly.
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"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.
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Worse than that, "support" for WMA in a portable player chipset doesn't generally mean the hardware can decode it by itself. It means that the hardware has enough memory and enough DSP horsepower to decode it when combined with an appropriate software codec. This is a case of licensing or not licensing the WMA codec, not just the crypto. It would almost certainly have cost Apple money on every iPod to support even the unencrypted WMA. This isn't something you get for free just by using a particular piece of hardware....
I would also hardly call WMA support "highly desirable". Among Microsoft employees who have portable music players, the iPod market share is reportedly 80%. If it were so desirable, don't you think at least Microsoft employees would favor Zunes because they support WMA? I think we can safely establish that at least as far as consumers are concerned, WMA support is not desirable. As far as consumers are concerned, a WMA file, an MP3 file, and an AAC file are all the same thing as an AIFF file. Most consumers just don't care. Expecting a hardware vendor to pay extra money on every unit for a feature that few users care about is silly, and I can't imagine how much crack their lawyers must have been smoking when they took on such a frivolous case.
If they were doing something useful like suing for the right to sell FairPlay songs, that would at least make sense, but suing because Apple didn't pay to license the WMA codec is about the most asinine lawsuit I've ever heard of. This makes the SCO lawsuits seem positively sensible by comparison....
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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.
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Audio formats supported: AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4), Apple Lossless, WAV, and AIFF
Only one of the 7 formats is DRM'ed (ie. "locked"), and only 2 have any sort of Apple proprietary nature to them (Apple Lossless and the FairPlay DRM'ed AAC). They shouldn't be forced to adopt a competitor's DRM. And Amazon proved you can create an online service compatible with the iPod.
In short, they'll get thrown out of court.
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly you weren't around during the Jon Katz era.
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Apple's response... (Score:5, Funny)
Standard or proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)
You can macro these headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
Lather, rinse and repeat.
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...
I must have been in a transporter accident... (Score:5, Insightful)
Scotty, for the love of God, get me out of here.
Since when (Score:5, Insightful)
is playing WMA files considered a desirable feature in a portable music player?
A monopoly is not magically illegal. (Score:5, Insightful)
iPods have been unable to play WMA since when there was only one iPod. The condition precedes any monopoly.
Microsoft is in fact in the marketplace and makes a very brown player that plays WMA just fine.
Stacie is perfectly free to buy one of those.
Next?
Re:This is /. (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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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...
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Re:Spluh (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Spluh (Score:5, Insightful)
YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG PLAYER.
Err... I bought an ipod precisely for the extra features, like smart playlist syncing, collecting play stats, being able to rate songs on the ipod itself, create multiple playlists with overlapping songs but only have one copy of the song on the disk, etc, etc.
All that pretty much requires the ipod style 'database'. I don't -want- to swap the materials back and forth manually. TYVM.
I -do- agree it sucks that music is sort of hidden on the ipod, and can't be played if its not in the ipod's database, and would welcome the ability to rebuild the ipod database on the fly as a feature addition. And there are other features I'd add too.
But between choosing manual song and folder management vs ipods way... I choose the ipod. No question.
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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.
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Re:Rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as the consumer is fully in control of whether to choose the product or its alternatives, there is no monopoly, regardless of how many units are sold. What makes something a monopoly is the lack of "close substitutes". Clearly, that is not the case for the iPod. You may not like the appearance of other players, but there are plenty of them out there, and they are at least reasonably close substitutes. People choose the iPod because either they believe it is the best choice or they think it is hip or they have had bad experiences with other companies' products or... lots of reasons, but the lack of reasonably usable alternatives is not one of them. iPods aren't even the cheapest players out there, so you can't even argue that Apple's volume makes it impossible to compete well....
The fundamental flaw with any argument based solely on number of units sold is that there is no real iPod lock-in. With operating systems, you are pretty much locked in. The cost of buying new software to support another OS is huge, plus there are all the compatibility problems with files, etc. With music, you have a choice. You can choose to buy music from the iTunes Store if you want, knowing full well that you will have to burn to a CD and have a little quality loss if you want to move to a non-Apple player, but you can also choose to buy DRM-free music on CD, from Amazon, or even some selections from the iTunes Store. I could switch to any other player right now if somebody came out with a better one. I'd have to spend a few hours converting my protected AACs to unprotected AACs (burning to a CD and ripping it), but I could do it. The barrier to switching is basically zero, and other alternatives exist. Thus, no monopoly. Simple as that.
Caveat: IANALBIPOOSD.
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Re:Really (Score:5, Insightful)
WMA is a proprietary format also, with or without DRM. So, Apple not interested in paying royalties to Microsoft for WMA capability is monopolistic? Unless Microsoft is giving it away for free, that doesn't sound like a case. Why not sue Warner for monopolizing their own catalog? Or EMI?
Trolls
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