Apple WINS iPod case Ping!
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Posted on 12/16/2014 2:44:40 PM PST by Swordmaker
“A federal jury handed Apple a win in a long-running antitrust case on Tuesday, rejecting plaintiffs’ claims that the company had sidelined competitors and hiked up prices during the iPod’s heyday,” Julia Love reports for The Mercury News.
“After just a few hours of deliberations, the eight-member jury sided with Apple that iTunes 7.0 was a meaningful improvement over previous versions of the software, rather than a plot to hobble rivals,” Love reports. “The verdict defuses a case that could have cost Apple as much as $1 billion.”
“The trial was full of legal drama, including an eleventh-hour search for a plaintiff after Apple revealed that the two class representatives had not bought iPods covered by the case. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers appointed a new plaintiff just hours before closing arguments were given on Monday.,” Love reports. “Although a few Apple executives took the stand, Steve Jobs was the trial’s star witness. Plaintiffs played a deposition taken of the late Apple CEO shortly before his death in 2011.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Blessedly, it ends. How much time (including that of a terminally ill visionary) and money was wasted on this farce?
Shouldn’t those who instigated this greedy, baseless idiocy be forced to pay for this frivolous waste of everyone’s time and resources?
(Excerpt) Read more at macdailynews.com ...
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Good decision!
GOOD NEWS
Let’s hope loser has to pay all costs!
Sweet! The jury showed good sense and Apple showed wisdom for fighting this and not settling. The plaintiffs’ (who the plaintiff attorneys had trouble finding and keeping) class action attorneys won’t be getting a penny so their dreams of unearned riches go down the drain. It’s unfortunate that our laws don’t have “loser pays” provision to minimize such frivolous and costly lawsuits.
Let’s hope this is Real’s last gasp and their legal expenses drive them into liquidation.
** In Before the Freepers Who Try to Make This Seem Like a Loss for Apple
RealNetwork was not involved in this lawsuit, not even as a witness.
This case was brought to court by an ambulance chasing law firm who saw an opportunity to dig into Apple's pockets and came up with two legal theories. The first was that Apple had illegally tied purchase of iPods to buying music from the iTunes store. . . but their first attempt fizzled on that when the judge in that case ruled there was nothing illegal about that at all.
So they came up with a really creative second theory they've been chasing for almost TEN YEARS now. That theory is that some owners of iPods MUST have lost their music when Apple upgraded their software in the move from iTunes 6.x to iTunes 7.0 and iTunes 7.3 to iTunes 7.4 which broke the hack that RealNetwork had used to get the iPod to accept their Harmony DRM music as though it were FairPlay DRM Music. You see, the reset caused any non-Apple iTunes music to no longer play or upload so in the Attorney's view, this was Apple "deleting" the user's 3rd party purchased or downloaded music from every source. In fact, in the closing argument, the Attorney Plaintiff claimed it turned the iPod into a "brick."
However, no one had EVER complained to Apple about such a thing happening. . . nor were there such complaints anywhere else in the blogs or help forums. So these creative attorneys just went ahead and filed a class action lawsuit affirming that there is a class of 8 million iPod users this COULD have happened to if they had tried to use RealNetworks and music from other sources on the iPod. . . and then updated their iPods with iTunes 7.0 and iTunes 7.4 and were then forced to reset their iPods because their 3rd party music would no longer play.
They had three "Lead Plaintiffs" who supposedly owned iPods from the period. . . but these fell by the wayside as it turned out they did not buy their iPods during the period in question. . . and the last one, the wife of one of the partners in the firm, who claimed she had an iPod that she bought during the period, turned out to have used the Law Firm's credit card to buy the iPod so SHE really did not own it. . .and that iPod was purchased three months AFTER the date the class members had to have bought an iPod to qualify! The judge disqualified her two days into the trial.
This resulted in a case AT TRIAL, in which there were no LEAD PLAINTIFFS! Something that has never happened before in the history of jurisprudence. So the Judge went plaintiff shopping. A certain Barbara Bennett from Boston, a 65 year old Ice Dancer (I kid you not) volunteered to step in as Lead Plaintiff in the case. . . but HER complaint was not that she lost music from 3rd party sources, but rather that the iTunes store did not carry the really rare Hungarian Tangos that she liked, so she had to BUY Hungarian Tango CDs (0h, the horror of it all) and use the iTunes software to rip her own music off the CDs and then load it onto her iPod herself! She actually had to do some work to get her music she liked on her iPod! It made her ANGRY at Apple that it wasn't available on iTunes!
Of course her complaint was exactly the opposite of what the Attorney Plaintiffs were claiming was not possible, i.e., putting music from sources other than from Apple's iTunes Store on an iPod, but who's quibbling about facts here? They just didn't put her on the stand to tell the jury about her complaint!
Nor did they call RealNetwork to testify about how they hacked their way into the iPod by taking advantage of a security vulnerability in iTunes and the iPod. Apple could have then asked RealNetwork about how they hijacked a lot of other music files on people's computers, taking over their playback into RealPlayer without users' permission and how difficult it was to get rid of RealPlayer back when all this was going down.
The whole thing was like the Keystone Kops trying to be lawyers. . . and never having taken a law course. . .
You can't make this stuff up. A real judge would have held the whole lot of these fools in contempt of court.
I've gotten come-ons from lawyers in the past, for various class-action suits. I may have gotten one from these lawyers. I ignore them all, usually there is nothing for a sane person to complain about. I used several MP3 players around the time this event happened. I used to use Real Networks' music in my Archos Jukebox. It fell into disuse for the superior iPod player, which I ripped a lot of music into. One thing I used the Archos Jukebox for was as a portable storage device, moving up to 20GB back and forth from work and home via the USB port. I wasn't hurt by this lawsuit event, and I doubt anyone really was hurt at all. The popularity of the iPod shows people liked it and iTunes over the alternative players.
Wow, a sensible outcome. Who knew?
it would have taken an O.J. Jury to have blown this one.
True, but O.J.'s trial was over a hell of a lot quicker. What a colossal waste of money and time this was. Think what good those resources could have done.
I hate the lawyers that do this sh*t. Instead of wanking for a decade in court, they'd have been more honest if they just robbed people outright.
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