iTunes Customer Suing Apple over iPod-opoly
Apple has been sued by a customer of their iTunes Online Digital Music Store on the charge that the company broke antitrust laws by only allowing iTunes to work with Apple’s music player iPod. This leads to incompatibility of other music players with their online store. Apple launched their iTunes services in 2003, 2 years after they introduced iPod to the world. They apply proprietary technology, which makes sure songs downloaded from iTunes are only allowed to play on an iPod.
Californian Thomas Slattery filed the suit in the U.S. District Court in San Jose. He is claiming unspecified damages for being forced by Apple to buy the iPod music player to listen to songs bought from iTunes. He would however require to prove that iTunes is no different from other music stores on the web which allow downloaded music to be played on many music devices.
Apple has been very successful with their venture consisting of the iPod and iTunes. They have sold more than 6 million units of the music player. In addition, they have also sold more than 200 million songs through their online store. This alone has had an incredible effect on their earnings and profits for the year.
Apple in response to charges of breaking anti-trust laws claim that binding iTunes based songs to iPod helps them control piracy of the songs. They use a technology called FairPlay DRM to lock the songs from other digital music players.
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Sushubh Mittal is the Tech Columnist of the Search Engine Journal and Editor of the TechWhack Tech Blog Network
