Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) avoided a billion dollars plus in damages after a jury terminated a class-action lawsuit in which it was accused of suppressing competition for iPod music players. Bloomberg’s, Tim Higgins, maintains the lawsuit went on to shed more light on how Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) operated a decade ago under the leadership of Steve Jobs.
“It is a win for Apple it says they were not participating in this anti-trust sort of things. It was kind of a window into how Apple was operating a decade ago, in the build up for the iTunes. They are a different company now they are under a new leadership with Tim Cook as the CEO,” said Mr. Higgins.
The victory according to Higgins gives Cook a new lease of life to stamp his authority in the company as most of the current lawsuits begun when Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was still an underdog, trying to make its name.
The jury concluded that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) did not act in any way to corner iPod users so that it could create a monopoly by shunning music from other players. The Cupertino-based company had been accused of installing a software update in 2006 that blocked users from playing songs not purchased from the iTunes store.
The plaintiffs had argued that the installation of the software locked them into Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s ecosystem, which in return drove prices up for future iPod devices. The jurors on their part concluded that iTunes 7.0 update was a genuine product improvement that did not infringe on anti-trust laws. Antitrust attorney, William Markham, believes it was an important victory for apple with attention now shifting to the e-book case which Apple is appealing.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) had been accused of colluding with a number of publishers to increase the prices of e-books as a counter measure to Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) offering discounts that went on to affect publisher’s returns. Markham notes that Apple still has a number of legal hurdles on its hands that it will have to go through in 2015.
“Apple has been a central defendant in the employee poaching case in which Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE) and a number of other significant Silicon Valley companies were accused of agreeing with one another not to compete against one another. For engineers and other high levels high-tech employees,” said Mr. Markham.
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