It looks like draconian digital rights management practices that included deleting songs from some users’ iPods if they came from rival stores wasn’t enough to convince a jury that Apple violated antitrust regulations. The New York Times’ Bruce X. Chen reports via Twitter that a jury has tossed out a years-old lawsuit against Apple that alleged the company engaged in anticompetitive behavior to make sure its iTunes Store remained the dominant marketplace for digital music.
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Apple had been accused of implementing anticompetitive practices against competing digital music stores as it tried to restrict the songs that users could load onto their iPods to either songs ripped from CDs or songs bought from iTunes. Earlier this month we learned that the company had even deleted songs from users’ iPods that were purchased from other stores. What’s more, Apple admitted that it did this without informing users about it, which meant that some iPod users may have believed the songs were just accidentally erased.
However, it seemed the jury bought Apple’s explanation that it needed to implement these restrictive measures for security purposes to protect users from harmful or malicious content. Chen informs us that the jury ruled that these practices represented “genuine product improvements” to the iPod that weren’t at all anticompetitive.
