Apple has notified the court that it plans to move for a dismissal in the class action lawsuit against its DRM practices, claiming the plaintiffs in the case did not purchase any iPods which are covered in the lawsuit.
This lawsuit is the silliest lawsuit in a long string of silly lawsuits. What a waste of court resources. Has there ever been a legitimate class-action lawsuit in tech?
The “Sony Would You Mind Not Installing a Rootkit on My Machine” suits were pretty legit.
Yeah, there was also a class action lawsuit against AT&T that AT&T lost, because it failed to deliver advertised speeds to its DSL customers.
I’m curious if there’s been any lawsuits filed against mobile carriers in the US for their blatant false advertising of unlimited data, where they throttle you after 5gb or so.
Out of curiosity, which carriers still claim unlimited? Thought they’d all dropped that pretense a few years ago.
Ha, on the T-Mobile Android app, the usage says something like ‘Unlimited of 2.5GB used’
Difference is that the 2.5GB is what you get at “Hi-speed”; it really is unlimited, and in the way they advertise it to be at that.
TemporalBeing,
I always heard that tmobile would throttle all their plans back down to 2G/slower speeds (128Kbps or 64Kbps) once you’ve used up your quota, including unlimited plans.
It’s not just tmobile, the FCC has had recent investigations into all the carriers over obfuscated claims regarding “unlimited” plans.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/11/25/3596703/t-mobile-thrott…
Yes; quite agree. AT&T, Verizon, etc have all had issues in their “Unlimited”. “Unlimited” has never been “Unlimited” – not for Cellular or even normal ISP; they always just put the “cap” high enough that most people wouldn’t realize.
As far as T-Mobile goes, I’m sure they’ve had issues in the past; their present “unlimited 2G + limited 4G” is something relatively new, but thus far it is As-Advertised, but we haven’t exactly pushed it ourselves as we barely use 1GB data between both our phones (on a 3GB “unlimited” plan).
They ALL still claim to have “unlimited” plans which are limited to 2 to 5 GB per month.
It may not make sense today, but this was a valid suit when filed. We should not let Apple off the hook for crimes just because they have stalled the case so long it hardly makes sense with modern eyes. If anything they should be punished harder for it.
Much as I don’t like defending Apple sometimes, seem to me that Apple were within their rights here. As best I understand this, and please correct me if I’m mistaken, RealNetworks (remember those creeps?) reverse-engineered Apple’s DRM. Whether you agree with it or not (I know I don’t), these actions are against the law in the US, specifically the DMCA. This puts RealNetworks in the role of criminal according to the law, not Apple. Personally I think they’re both scumbags, but the law’s on Apple’s side here.
darknexus,
I am not following this case at all, however I wanted to clarify something because many people may not realize that the DMCA actually does explicitly permit reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.
http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
Unfortunately, the lawyers who wrote this legislation were incredibly lazy and didn’t realize (or care) the same tools would be used for both interoperability as well as copyright infringement depending on the intentions of the people using them. A prominent example of this was DVD-John & DeCSS, where the courts used the DMCA to ban thousands of sites from distributing DeCSS for playback on alternative platforms, in spite of the fact that the DMCA explicitly allowed circumvention for this purpose.
Edit:
I found this link, which has some more examples of how courts have ruled on reverse engineering.
https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq
Edited 2014-12-06 22:29 UTC
Why yes sir, I’m always bent over for the ease of my corporate overlords.
It would only be against the DCMA if they circumvented copy-right protection. They didn’t. The entire point was in fact to make it possible to Real to sell DRM files for the iPods. There was no circumvention, just reengineering and then using the options Apple’s format had for programming other authentication endpoints until Apple removed it.
Aside from the other comment that pointed out they did not “circumvent”; reverse engineering is allowed in the US in order to provide compatibility with another system. (IANAL)
So all-in-all they were probably well within their rights even under the DMCA.
First of all, we all know the recording industry are idiots. They insisted on adding DRM, whether Apple wanted it or not.
Either way, you’d be a fool to think Apple wouldn’t develop some means to prevent competitors from (a) putting music on iPods not bought through Apple AND (b) copying music bought through Apple onto any other hardware.
At the time, Apple was new to the MP3 player market. It was annoying and wrong, but it wasn’t necessarily technically anticompetitive. Sadly, there isn’t much of a case here.
Apple was blocking the use of other companies DRM music files on the iPod. I only have 2 albums purchased with DRM as I prefer CDs. I received several iTunes cards as gifts.
iTunes let you add files without DRM wherever it come from, also I used a Nokia N95 and it could use the iTunes library. I used the Nokia app and it would read the iTunes library files as they were xml and let you sync by albums, artist or even the custom playlists you make.
A related but off topic note.
Palm.
Remember how they were spoofing the USB codes for iPods so their phones would sync like an iPod?
Nokia could write a bare bones app that worked Palm were too lazy to do even that.