SAN FRANCISCO: A US jury on Tuesday cleared Apple of abusing its dominant market position in an antitrust case over online music for the iPod.
The class-action antitrust case in California federal court featured dramatic videotaped testimony recorded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs before he died in 2011. The $350 million lawsuit accused the tech giant of illegally forcing iPod users to purchase their music on its iTunes service. The amount could have touched $1 billion if the company was found guilty.
The suit said that iPod buyers between 2006 and 2009 were blocked from buying music from other vendors, advancing Apple’s dominant position on music downloads. But the jury ruled otherwise.
“We thank the jury for their service and we applaud their verdict,” Apple said in a statement. “We created iPod and iTunes to give our customers the world’s best way to listen to music. Every time we’ve updated those products – and every Apple product over the years – we’ve done it to make the user experience even better.” Jobs’ testimony from a few months before his death in October 2011 was played at the hearing Friday.
In excerpts published by online news site “The Verge,” he said that Apple was very concerned about retaliatory measures that could be taken by record companies if songs purchased in iTunes and downloaded to an iPod were then copied onto somebody else’s computer. “We went to great pains to make sure that people couldn’t hack into our digital rights management system because if they could, we would get nasty emails from the labels threatening us that they were going to yank the license,” Jobs said.
