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DRM The Courts Apple

Apple DRM Lawsuit Might Be Dismissed: Plaintiffs Didn't Own Affected iPods 141

Posted by timothy from the none-of-your-business dept.
UnknowingFool writes The lawsuit involving Apple and iTunes DRM may be thrown out because the plaintiffs did not own the iPods for which they are suing. The lawsuit covers iPods for the time period between September of 2006 and March of 2009. When Apple checked the serial numbers of the iPods of the plaintiffs, it appears they were not manufactured during this time. One plaintiff did purchase an iPod in 2005 and in 2010 and has withdrawn from the suit. The second plaintiff's iPod was manufactured in July 2009 but claims purchasing another iPod in 2008. Since the two plaintiffs were the only ones in the suit, the case may be dismissed for lack of standing.
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Apple DRM Lawsuit Might Be Dismissed: Plaintiffs Didn't Own Affected iPods More

Apple DRM Lawsuit Might Be Dismissed: Plaintiffs Didn't Own Affected iPods

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  • You're suing it wrong.

    You're buying it wrong.

    You're DRM'ing it wrong.

    Now that the stupid cliché is done, let's continue with the real discussion.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dahamma ( 304068 )

      Except in this case, there really isn't a real discussion beyond lawyers wanting to make money but who can't actually find a case...

      "Lawyer for the plaintiffs, Bonny Sweeny, suggested that while one or both of her plaintiffs' iPods might not be covered by the case, there are plenty of others to be tapped."

      Clearly a case of a lawyer representing the interests of her clients and not just fishing for cash!

    • You are trolling it wrong.

  • I guess the thrill of big fees in a class-action suit made them forget to do some elementary checking.

    • Re:Lawyers not doing their homework (Score:5, Funny)

      by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Friday December 05, 2014 @08:07PM (#48535509) Homepage Journal

      no it was Steve Jobs reality distortion field that made the plaintiffs think they bought an ipod when they didn't.

    • Apple is a brand that tells people to think outside the box.

      Sue different.

    • So the question, and I fear the answer, will the plaintiffs get their money back from the lawyers?
      • The plaintiffs lied under oath, so I think that they have more to worry about than whether they'll get their money back from the lawyers.
      • Most of these class action lawsuits are contingency meaning the lawyers take no fees from the client but expect the court to award them money if successful. As such the only ones out will be the lawyers and Apple who had to pay for their costs.

    • I would have thought if you were launching a class action suit where each potential litigant had only a tiny damage, that you would have hundreds of candidates up front. If you can only find 2 people, and each of them has coming to them.. oh what $50, and even they don't own the right iPod, how good was this suit?

      • You do not have to have a huge number of plaintiff for class action status; however, the plaintiffs must be representative of the class. In this case they may not have been. If the suit is successful then the settlement is passed to the class with lawyers unfortunately getting the bulk of the money. Personally I think this was just a money grab rather than individuals being harmed.

  • you could put all the non-drm music you bought or "acquired" you want on them, but anything with DRM was always only itunes music. the same thing was with every other MP3 player of the time with a DRM'd music store. but only apple is left and they have the money

  • Not unexpected. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pushing-robot ( 1037830 ) on Friday December 05, 2014 @08:09PM (#48535525)

    I've observed that flaws in Apple products seem to most affect those who do not use Apple products.

    • Re:Not unexpected. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Friday December 05, 2014 @08:22PM (#48535609) Homepage

      I've observed that flaws in Apple products seem to most affect those who do not use Apple products.

      Well said. There are criticisms of Apple products by Apple users. But they have a level of nuance that's appropriate. The Apple haters who know nothing of Apple products yet thing they do, you end up having to argue with all the time. I've noticed the same thing about Oracle on /. as well whenever databases come up.

      • I've noticed the same thing about Oracle on /. as well whenever databases come up.

        Really? Apple has both critics and fanbois/fangoils. But I have never seen anything but universal hatred for Oracle.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by alexhs ( 877055 )

          But I have never seen anything but universal hatred for Oracle.

          Oracle haters are hyperbolic and hateful.
          Oracle users are factual and desperate.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jbolden ( 176878 )

          Yep. You'll see the people who need Oracle's features say positive things about it. People who have to admin hundreds of databases, or very large tables or need to tweak queries. I've definitely seen the Oracle users stand up for Oracle. I've seen the "I could easily run this on MySQL but I have to use Oracle" crowd say bad stuff as well though.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kjella ( 173770 )

            I think most agree that when you really need Oracle, you need it but I think the company has a lot less fans than the product. When you have a huge, mission critical database running on Oracle they know they got you hooked deep because short of a major disaster nobody wants to try migrating away. And last I checked their financials they're very good at making you pay for the privilege. Of course that's not unique to Oracle, but they're the big player in that segment, while for example SQL Server is used for

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jbolden ( 176878 )

              Oracle as a company has been moving up market. A trusted vendor to the fortune 100, state and federal government. They still have clients below that level but they are going after big money clients. They've been disrupted from below.

              Oracle the product gets criticism I think mainly from people who have never admin a complex database.

      • I'm neither an Apple nor a Microsoft user. There is no need for me to criticize either of them (especially from a standpoint of a non-user with limited knowledge). I just ignore them and go on my own way. I'll leave the complaining to people who actually use their products.

        On the other hand, I can see complaints from non-users on the basis of compatibility. I do get tired of people saying "send me a Word document" and the like, but they just get whatever LibreOffice puts out and that will have to do. It g

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbolden ( 176878 )

          Those complaints in the "playing well with others" they both kinda suck at. Even their defenders concede that point. FWIW they are both getting better. Apple used to be much worse about compatibility a decade ago. Microsoft has the "we are the standard". Funny enough Office, at least: Word, PowerPoint and Excel works pretty darn well between them. Office for Mac has been a rather good seller for Microsoft for decades.

      • The Apple haters who know nothing of Apple products yet thing they do, you end up having to argue with all the time.

        I hate Apple the company for the way they have behaved over time. I have personally been bitten by some of their bugs, like the B&W G3 data corruption problem (well documented across the mac web) which they deliberately deleted from the KB when they rolled the TIL into it to hide that they told their paying customers to suck it up and live with the bug, and either spend money to buy FWB toolkit and degrade performance, or buy an IDE card complete with mac tax. (I did actually price this, at the time it

        • I hear OSX has improved a lot since the last time I used it, on a dual G5 which would beachball constantly and hang hard on occasion. Apple couldn't find anything wrong with it, so I conclude that it was the OS. But it was fairly awful to use and horribly unreliable at the time, so I had lots of valid bad things to say about OSX, from experience.

          So you are basing your experience of OS X on a version you used somewhere between 8 -11 years ago? Well that explains a lot about your posts on Apple then.

          It is pretty much indisputable that itunes is a gigantic turd, especially on Windows. I know this from experience, too.

          If you just admitted that you haven't used OS X in at least 8 years can you say it was a turd on OS X? You don't know, do you?

    • That's true. The 2 are correlated, but I suspect you have the causation backwards. It's not that the flaws affect us because we don't use Apple products, but rather that we don't use Apple products because the flaws affected us. At least that's the case for me. I actually gave Apple a shot for a few years, and the longer I did, the more I regretted it, so I'm done with them now.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zbaron ( 649094 )
        Would you be so kind as to highlight some of those flaws and how they affected you? This might save others from making the same mistake and having the same regrets you did.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      I've observed that flaws in Apple products seem to most affect those who do not use Apple products.

      Did it really never occur to you that the ones most likely to be affected by a 'flaw' in something would also be the ones most likely to avoid using that something?

      Here are other examples:

      The people most allergic to peanuts refuse to eat peanut products.

      The people who got a hair in their food at a restaurant are far less likely to eat at or recommend that restaurant to others.

      By definition the people using pr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )

        By definition the people using products are either relatively unaffected by the flaws, or unaware of them. The people most aware of or most affected by flaws are among the least likely to use the product. That's just common sense.

        Yeah but that doesn't justify the antagonism. For example lots of Chinese use a writing keyboard for characters and many of those suck and have flaws. I don't spend a lot of time talking about them though.

  • The best (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Friday December 05, 2014 @08:47PM (#48535745)
    Way to sink your case is to lie.

    If your hatred of Apple is so white hot,

    If your hatred of Apple gets you foaming so bad at the mouth,

    that you would lie, that it is okay to do

    the fault's not with Apple

    The fault lies with you

  • This lawsuit is bullshit. I remember this time and the issue from when it happened. Apple had DRM fights with Realplayer and Rhapsody. Basically Apple allowed you to import unprotected mp3 files and audio CD's. They further allowed (of course) purchases from their own store and were under contractual obligations from record companies to lock down music from the iTunes store at that time. What Rhapsody and Realplayer wanted to do is to sell DRM'ed music yet let it play under iTunes and obviously the iPo

  • The second plaintiff's iPod was manufactured in July 2009 but claims purchasing another iPod in 2008.

    An iPod bought an iPod?

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