Remember RealPlayer? Well, the company behind that software has been granted a jury trial in an antitrust lawsuit from 2004. At the heart of the suit is an anti-piracy measure added to iTunes and the iPod after Real Networks debuted its RealPlayer competitor. According to the suit, Apple deliberately stopped iTunes and iPods from playing music purchased from the competing store through several iTunes updates.
Real Networks says that this cause $351,631,153 in damages, breaking the claim down even further as “$148,947,126 for resellers, $194,655,141 for direct purchasers, and $8,028,886 for additional iPod sales from the additional transactions.” The full ruling is below.
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GOLDDIGGERS, LOL.
Anti-trust from 2004? Good luck with that. There were many (not so popular) products out there to play music at that time.
Not to mention that you could, before, at the time and since, buy non-DRM music from anywhere on the planet in AAC or MP3 format or any format for that matter, including CDs, and toss them either directly into iTunes for conversion or pass them through another compatible conversion app before dropping them directly into your iPod and iTunes music library.
One more… It sounds ONLY like Apple has an actionable DMCA claim against REAL. Because Real’s own lawsuit is totally without merit. Had they been selling non-DRM music, like some other stores, their files would have played fine with both iTunes and iPods.
DRM was a requirement of the music industry for Apple and protecting that investment and IP required them to take the steps to block the infringing reverse engineered software being offered by Real.
This reads like a malware author suing an Anti-Virus/Security software company.
Seriously, hasn’t this non-issue been overtaken by events long ago?
And where’s Florian Mueller when we need him?
(Sorry, had to get that one in…)
What a waste of time…the damages are so speculative that even if they were to win (which they WON’T), the reduced amount will barely pay for the lawyers.
So maybe it is the lawyers who are keeping the suit alive. “I keep telling you I am going to get paid, but big time, by Apple to settle this thing out of court. You just have to hold on a little longer…”
I remember back then, my Windows PC would start getting Adware after installing or using RealPlayer. Besides, it’s was slow and ugly.
I was always able to play mp3s
Hmm, I’ve got money on anybody who can remember Real’s file extension– oh, .ra or .ram. Now, it had copy protection on it. So they wanted to be able to install their files on iTunes. Not mp3, that would play unprotected. There were some other audio files that played, but they were unprotected. If the .wmv was protected, it wouldn’t play, because you couldn’t decrypt and convert. Now, after Apple dropped copy protection — they wanted to before the labels allowed Amazon to have unprotected files at a lower price than they offered Apple. In what way was Apple being monopolistic? They did not want to share copy protection with Windows, or with Real. And neither did consumers. Once more than one copy protection scheme is allowed, then when there’s a ‘problem”, when Apple finds that there’s a bug in its algorithm, people are reversing the protection, it could be fixed within days. Make a general partnership between Apple’s fix, Microsoft’s fix, and Real — and there were others — you’ve got two weeks and a committee doing the protection. And Apple would be paying out to the labels for all the “stolen” music. That’s the only way the labels would allow the distribution of digital music at first. Right?
RealPlayer sucked. Then herb sucked them.