Let’s hope this is Real’s last gasp and their legal expenses drive them into liquidation.
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. . .