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Apple asks a judge to throw out an anti-trust allegation

by on19 April 2011


Because we said so
Lawyers for Jobs' Mob have asked a Judge to throw out a court case which claims it used DRM to control the music market.

Apple used FairPlay to encoding of digital music files ensured that songs bought through iTunes would play only on iPods and not other music players. In July 2004, RealNetworks released software called Harmony that was designed to crack through FairPlay's DRM and allow its own digital music files to play on the iPod.

Steve Jobs decided to update the iPod in October and rendering RealNetworks' content unplayable. The lawsuit claims that Apple's use of FairPlay allowed it to maintain a monopoly over both digital audio players and music downloads.

Apple insists that blocking of downloads that used competitors' software was designed to improve iTunes customers' experience and it knows what was best for them. Apple felt iPods worked better when consumers use the iTunes jukebox rather than third-party software that can cause corruption or other problems. Apparently that argument is all Apple thinks is required to go for a dismissal of the case.  To put the argument into perspective.  That is like Microsoft saying that its Internet Explorer was much better than Firefox so it had to be on the operating system.
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