In a case rich in irony, an antitrust suit has been filed against Apple (AAPL) accusing the company of illegally maintaining a monopoly in the digital music market by failing to support Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Media Audio format.
..., according to Somers’ lawsuit, which quotes Steve Jobs as bragging that Apple’s iTunes store is now “the Microsoft of music stores.”
According to the complaint, Apple controls 75 percent of the online video market, 83 percent of the online music market, more than 90 percent of the hard-drive based music player market, and 70 percent of the Flash-based music player market.
Yet among the major digital music vendors, Apple is alone in not supporting Windows Media Audio. The suit estimates that Apple could license WMA from Microsoft for less than $1 million — or about 3 cents for each iPod sold in 2005.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
MSFT: making the rules so APPL won't
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I'm not sure when the plaintiff began hatching their plan to file this suit, but Amazon has been selling digital music in the "standard" MP3 format (which works on everything) for several months now. And they're selling their digital music without any DRM restrictions, so there's no risk of vendor lock-in with anybody's player - and most of the major record labels are represented. (In fact, the major labels have been more willing to provide DRM-free music to Amazon than they have to Apple.) I'm not sure what the plaintiff's angle is here.
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