Lawyers filed a 10-count lawsuit against Apple earlier this week, claiming the ties between the company's iTunes music download service and its iPod violate state and federal antitrust law.
Slattery v. Apple, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California in San Jose, is a plea to allow the case to become a class action lawsuit on behalf of anyone who has used the iTunes service or bought an iPod from Apple since April 28, 2003, the day iTunes first opened shop.
The suit is also seeking compensation for the affected users and to "disgorge its ill-gotten gains, and awarding the proceeds of this disgorgement to" the plaintiff and class action members. . . .
[T]he suit claims Apple broke the law when it altered the industry standard Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) file format and used it to restrict the music's usage outside the iPod. Songs sold to the public on iTunes use the AAC with Fairplay Digital Rights Management (DRM), called AAC Protected.
With the altered AAC files, the suit claims, users can't play the music on any other portable digital music player than iPod and they can't convert the music files to MP3 files. Also, the suit claims Apple has rigged the hardware and software on its iPod so that files downloaded from other online music stores can't be directly played on the device.
"At the same time, by engaging in this unlawful conduct, Apple has managed to unlawfully maintain its monopoly market power in the market for online music sales because owners of the monopolized iPod product who wish to purchase music tracks online have no choice, given Apple's conduct, but to purchase these tracks only from Apple's iTunes store," the suit reads.
I guess things go both ways (see second post below). Details here from internetnews.com.