Would Apple Pay Consumers $1 Billion For Deleting Their Music?
Paris, France, December 7, 2014 (Newswire.com) - The case might have seemed strange to happy customers, but new evidence shows that Apple may have actually deleted competing music files from users' iPods.
"It sounds damning initially," Kaiser Wahab, an attorney and partner at Wahab & Medenica LLC, told Benzinga. "It's very easy to say, 'Okay, it was deliberate, therefore it was evil.'"
Wahab (who has represented Fortune 500 companies in the areas of technology, media, brand and intellectual property) said that the iPod is a device that is "imminently hackable." He said that Apple was very concerned about security at the time, so there are a "lot of reasonable explanations as to why they did this."
"The plaintiffs' side is introducing e-mails where Jobs was railing against RealNetworks at the time," said Wahab. "They're trying to paint Jobs as a guy who hates competition, [but] you can read those e-mails in another way. You can read those e-mails as, 'Jobs is very upset that people are trying to mess with this machine that they've spent a great deal of time trying to make perfect and it's going to hurt the consumer more so because these devices are going to respond in ways and do things that people don't anticipate."
'Anti-Competitive Environment'
Plaintiffs claim that Apple overcharged its customers by nearly $350 million. According to The Guardian, antitrust laws could force Apple to pay three times that amount, creating a $1 billion loss for the Mac maker.
"Steve Jobs was always saying, 'Hey, they don't want other vendors connecting to our devices,'" Craig Delsack, a business, media and tech attorney in New York City, told Benzinga. "they think even back in 2004 he was trying to go after RealNetworks."
At the time RealNetworks hoped to universalize music playback with Harmony, a service that converted various music files to different formats. This would theoretically allow those files to be played on multiple devices.
"What Apple was objecting to was encoding it to the equivalent of the AAC-type of protection with the digital rights management built into it," said Delsack. "Apple basically said, 'they're going to crush all these people because they want to basically control the user experience from the delivery of the content, purchase of the content and then putting it onto the device player.'"
This differed from other players in the industry, which were more open to multiple music formats.
"they think the fact that Steve Jobs was really going after these other companies did create an anti-competitive environment," Delsack added. "Unfortunately, they know that's part of the fabric of Steve Jobs from some of the other lawsuits."
One of those suits involved Apple's plan to collude with book publishers to maintain higher e-book prices.
Consumer Expectations
Delsack said that another issue for Apple is consumer expectations. He said he personally could not recall his own expectation when he bought an iPod, but he vaguely remembers hearing Apple co-founder Steve Jobs say that the device could hold all of the user's music.
Indeed, when the iPod Nano was announced, Jobs went to great lengths to clarify how much smaller it was than every other device on the market. However, he made no mention of the fact that it may only play music ripped from CDs or files that are purchased from the iTunes Store.