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FORTUNE:
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The plaintiff is Stacie Somers, a San Diego-based attorney represented in this case by a gaggle of class-action specialists: Craig Briskin and Steven Skalet of Mehri & Skalet, Alreen Haeggquist of Haeggquist Law Group, and Helen Zeldes. Microsoft, of course, is the company usually associated with charges of antitrust behavior, most famously for tying Windows to Internet Explorer in United States v. Microsoft. Apple was named in that case, along with Netscape and Java, as one of the threats to its monopoly that Microsoft tried to crush.
But now the New Balance 991s are on the other foot, according to Somers’ lawsuit, which quotes Steve Jobs as bragging that Apple’s iTunes store is now “the Microsoft of music stores.” According to the complaint, Apple controls 75 percent of the online video market, 83 percent of the online music market, more than 90 percent of the hard-drive based music player market, and 70 percent of the Flash-based music player market. Yet among the major digital music vendors, Apple is alone in not supporting Windows Media Audio. The suit estimates that Apple could license WMA from Microsoft for less than $1 million — or about 3 cents for each iPod sold in 2005.
According to InformationWeek:…. the complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA.
Apple has faced other antitrust charges over its dominant position in digital music. See for example here. Most of these cases, however, complain that Apple maintains its grip by tying the iPod to the iTunes store. This is the first time Apple has been charged with trying to muscle Microsoft out of the market.
Licensing WMA could only increase market share for Apple, so whats the deal? The only thing holding me back from purchasing the iTouch is my aversion to the horrid iTunes.
But… Apple is supporting WMA. iTunes will happily convert it to AAC or MP3.
And if this is really a PlayForSure issue, well, excuse me for laughing.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Monopolies can be anywhere. It’s not like MS is asking for billions of unearned dollars.
Does make me think MS is trying to go for the scrappy underdog mantle though, which is funny.
Last time I looked, over 27 million unique users didn’t mind “touching” iTunes.
Of it’s several functions, I almost never buy individual songs online – still an old-fashioned type who buys CD’s, ripping one copy for my network storage using iTunes – put the CD in my jukebox in the living room. So, that’s the least important part of iTunes for me.
But, those subscriptions ranging from Cranky Geeks to Tekzilla are waiting for me every morning – just fine.
Funny how the tables have turned with MS!
You have to license WMA and WMV from M$, which means you have to pay them. Maybe Apple doesn’t want to pay the M$ tax for its use. Isn’t that their right?
iTunes horrid? no, Vista is horrid.. wait for OS X on any PC and watch what happens then.
this is bull, itunes converts wma to aac’s, just maybe not the protected wma. and does zune play itunes purchased songs? i think not
There is a very good reason why Apple doesn’t choose to support it’s competitor’s technically inferior, anticompetitively proprietary format. Might have something to do with being a technically inferior, anticompetitively proprietary format. I’ll have to look into that.
It takes a really special kind of pathological shamelessness for those scum to actually accuse someone else of trying to monopolize a market.
And what a hoot this is: “…deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA.”
So what? Microsoft just as deliberately designed the Zune to be incompatible with the LP audio format. And while we’re at it, Cuisinart deliberately designed their coffeemakers to be incompatible with Blue-ray Disc.
Oh, brother. ;D
BTW, folks; if iTunes doesn’t suit you, you might consider the open-source Songbird
Wandering back to the topic, eh? – are we really supposed to commit heart and soul to a tidy little gang of professional litigators? These clowns are about as “principled” as SCO.
And about as interesting. A civil anti-trust suit? Puhlease.
Weren’t all you guys cheering when Microsoft was accused of similar types of behavior and taken to court? Why arent you on MS’ side now?
Um, iTunes is all MP3’s encoded at 256k VBR now… I thought?? And all the DRM was basically gone? And without conversion(except for the zune), you can pretty much just drag and drop you iTune songs onto your device, as long as the device doesn’t have some sort of onerous DRM built in, like the iPod and Zune?
I donno, I use emusic.
11,
Nope. You can buy premium content, which is MP3 256… Still worse than CD, still more expensive. Or, just go to amazon.com and skip the whole Apple / iTunes garbage…
#12,
I don’t know, the led zepplin channel on xm has sort of dominated my music listening time since it launched…
Led Zepplin?? Aren’t they dead? Now, Pink Floyd I can do… Maybe even Dread Zepplin…
It’s really not an issue of not selling WMA music. Or it shouldn’t be. Should Walmart be sued because they don’t carry a certain brand of … well, anything? Instead the monopoly issue should be the fact that Apple doesn’t let anyone else make a player to play the iTunes DRM format.
If any player could play both iTunes and WMA music then it wouldn’t matter what store sold what format.
15,
I’ve said that before. What really needs to push it into anti-trust range is when Apple locks in Artists AND locks out competitor devices then there’s a shot..
WMA sucks someone should sue Microsoft for making it.
BOO-HOO, get me a tissue.
That has to qualify as “Funniest headline of the year”, no matter what’s going on.
This is bizarre, to say the least.
If Apple had incorporated the WMA they would have a greater market share than they do now, and would no doubt be charged with maintaining a larger monopoly.
Not too different from when the government decided to force Walmart to carry birth control. Only then you were cheering.
Scary. I mean it’s been what, 12 years or more now since Napster. And they still haven’t figured it out. We don’t want no crappy codecs that take more into account the intellectual property aspect than musical quality, compression, universal distribution, or ease of use. Next they’re going to sue all the player manufacturers that don’t support wma. Class action, my azz. Ipod kinda sucks, but I still can’t think of a better way to manage 30 GB of media in a more convenient package and since I ditched iTunes for WinAmp I actually kinda like it. MS is slowly but surely painting themselves in a corner, and I for one am enjoying the heck out of watching them fall.
“you’re an monopoly and stifling competition!”
“no we’re not! we sell mp3’s and you can play the m too”
“well you don’t support WMA!”
“yes we do – itunes will convert and add it to the library.”
“not if it PlaysForSure(tm)!”
“Sooo… we’re not playing fair because you locked your files?”
“Umm…. er… yes?”
hmmm. I can see this getting far…
The reason MS was getting put through the ringer was because they did things like refused to hand out the latest API info to companies that didn’t agree to only supply IE, thus both unethically forcing competitors out of the market and harming honest companies’ profits for giving people a choice of browsers.
That said, Apple is probably doing the same thing as MS in having a format that must be licensed. Both want their software and their music player to be dominant, so they lock people into formats that, for the most part, require their software and music players. Still, now that Apple is selling non-DRM AAC music you don’t have to completely cooperate with Apple to use the music they sell. And companies never had to pay Apple to license AAC, unlike MS and WMA.
The bottom line is that all companies try to control the market. That’s how they grow and secure their profits. But to say that it’s hypocritical to accuse MS of “anti-competitive” practices and not Apple is baseless. So far there’s no evidence that Apple is unethically strong arming other companies into playing their game. So far they’ve simply had better ideas and have been quicker to the punch.
People were complaining that MS was handing out IE for free, not supporting Office for Mac, not adopting Sun’s Java, though actually the base of the case according to the government’s top economist, who had supported IBM in their own case, was that MS was trying to illegally maintain its Office monopoly.
#25 – MuffinSpawn
This is a ringer.
This is a wringer.
You will notice that putting anything, including people, through a ringer is in no wise practical. But putting clothes – or, metaphorically, people – through a wringer will squeeze them dry.
If I worked for apple, I’d print out that lawsuit, and hang it on the wall.